Lost Wax

The emperor dresses his flesh;
the fat-cat god-king pimps
his chiselled dog-face to vulpine,
his brillo-hair, like steel-wool,
as tarnished as his iron will.

No new clothes, then,
only nakedness disguised,
surface gloss smeared like wax
into already broken stone.

The empress, one step behind, marches,
right-foot, left-foot, in his wake, reflects
his look-at-me stare, sits,
in the podium-moment, dead-eyed
as he sneers.

In cold-clay rooms,
in private-chambered nights,
he rises above her, statuesque,
sallow skin beneath a self-shaped suit,
his misdirected body, unsculpted, riven
with the scars of fork-tongued utterances,
every lie and twist, his own unmeasured wounds,
his own preposterous, glib pronouncements.

Here is the self-made man
who thumbed his own clay,
who wound the armature,
who chipped his old block
from fat-headed forefathers
who sucked on motherhood
drowned in weakness.

In all this, his making, his begetting,
all the beaten-down years of his growing up,
deceit was theirs long before this papered-over life;
and the wax-mask still rubs up to shine,
indistinguishable from stone.

The emperor, in the heat of the moment,
lets the weeping wax run; it reveals him
cast in different bronze, in man-shape,
neither god nor super-human,
only flawed, small-handed and inept,
like all the lordless rest
over which he looms.

© BH, 2018

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How the news-response habit begins to become second nature. Poetry24 posted a link to Carol Ann Duffy’s interview in the Guardian. She alludes to the recent past with Trump and Brexit as ‘evil twins’. Right enough, the poet needs to concentrate whatever caustic juices flow in the light of that.

I’ve written several pieces on the Donald - The Wind As It Blew, Strut, Enemy, Kakistocracy - and will do so again, no doubt.

In the meantime here is ‘DT, the memorial statue with cracks disguised (for a time)’ - not a snappy title I thought,, so ‘Lost Wax’ seemed better and it catches CAD’s mood and her Latin derivation for ‘sincere’ from the time of the ancients.

From Carol Ann Duffy’s notion (in ‘Sincerity’ about the word’s derivation from Greek and Roman sculptors who disguised flaws by covering them in wax. Here…