Fugu Sushi
Nothing, you commanded, dictated, would be further from the truth,
The purported, alleged, officially manipulated approved truth,
Than your death.
Indeed, all rumors, reports, notices deluging the blogosphere
Were way too obviously exaggerated, hyperbolized,
As was evident by the ubiquity of your in-living-color sightings.
After all, images, profiles, effigies, silhouettes of you
Decorated every available space throughout your kingdom.
Your voice droned on, incessantly, from millions of speakers.
All in all, your existence trumped every negative speculation
Of your untimely quietus,
Simply overwhelmed anyone addicted to media analog or digital.
And in the shadow-puppetry world of computer-produced illusion,
You lived on, running your governmental apparatus,
With an iron hand grasping the fasces of totalitarian mind-bind.
In fact, three hundred eighty-eight years passed peacefully,
With just the same subliminal and overt suppressions in place,
Which your line's primate instituted, at the outset of his dynasty.
And it was only by a perfectly innocent act of godless nature
That your nation, yet credulous almost four centuries after the fact,
Learned of your actual decease, in the Year of Casuistry,
When a state Grave Specialist assigned to the Sub-Crust Catacombs
Inadvertently got his broom tip lodged in a sooty crevice,
And, in finally prizing it free,
Created an avalanche of clammy walls, which exposed a chamber,
A cavernous opening, really,
That continued unfolding into a colossal city of glistening diamonds,
A subterranean "situation room" populated by the dead from all eras,
Ruled over by your energized soul's old spirit,
The life-force that originally informed your Draconian modus vivendi,
Each phantom, apparition beholden to your strict set of regulations
Dedicated to keeping order, above, in the "Upper Reaches,"
From devolving into disarray, chaos, anomie, self-destruction,
Ensuring that word of your death remained in the realm of exaggeration,
Was never obituarialized, its etiology suppressed, never aired:
A ruptured sphincter caused by an imperial surfeit of fugu sushi.
06/04/10
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