They starch their spines with borrowed daylight and call it dignity,
tongues varnished, knees rehearsed for velvet floors.
Gravitas for hire, they auction grief in clipped syllables,
while famine learns their signatures by heart.
The microphone becomes a confessional without repentance,
a chalice where cowardice ferments into policy.
They scold the storm yet sell umbrellas to thunder,
priests of prudence who never touch the wound.
Smiles stretch like diplomatic sutures over civic rot,
thirty-two enamelled alibis for obedient weather.
They script dissent in safe italics, never in blood,
and baptise retreat as “strategic restraint”.
Empire’s perfume clouds their moral cortex,
so they waltz, perfumed, through unpaid graves.
Thus the republic is practised as stagecraft, not duty,
and even the mask grows ashamed of the face beneath it.
