Powerless Might

Mwene Businge

He is almighty without power
blowing courtiers like dust in the wind
who shares his extremism by extrapolation in a system without friends.

Like a starved pig, he devours his own.
Mr Vision looks over his shoulders and even in his sleep finds traitors
by worrying about potential aspirants
for his throne.

He threatens them,
Then calls them swine as a riff-raff
or bribes them into singing empty melodies into his ear.

He says in the silence of his heart:
The throne is eternally and entirely mine. Who can wrench it from me?
No one can make my heart silent!

But he dreads the cowardly silence of intellectuals who fear to irk him
in the forlorn hope that he will leave them in peace.

He marks those with a backbone
To stand up to him with a number like the beast
feeding their eyes on red pepper,
spraying their bodies with paint,
abhorring exercise of raw power—the awakened masses.

He recruits cadres to defend the monster,
each wondering: Am I the next delicacy for the pig?

Cadres speak in tongues—
to insulate themselves from themselves and the pig.

The ‘eternal’ system recruits foolish youth,
who, like flies, will accompany its corpse to the grave.