Bamboozlement

Here's another inspired by West Wing, an episode where the Toby character (Who is based on me of course) is played by an opposition political operative, played by Felicity Hoffman.

Left for Dead

An important man looked a gift horse in the mouth

the horse was beautiful and its foreign phrasing

was so remote that the VIP was bamboozled.

Unnoticing, indifferent, aloof, his bamboozlement

suppressed like the guile of the beauty and the

opaque words, the bejewellment complimented:

a sky all hung with jewels, as someone once said.


The gift a detail, the gift unnoticed, adorning.

But where is my gift, where is mine, came the

petulant question, sprinkled over their heavy talk;

light, meaningless: pleasant, just-registered insistent.


All pleasantries as good as ignored, all that glitters

consigned to the children's table, seen but not heard

for these are serious times, and so was he hypnotised

by complexity and dark strategising, all the while seduced.


Every disposed-of moment immeasurably snug in the edifice,

cement and binding in the edifice, the tricks and mortar;

the insidious and eventually looming, dooming

tower of impenetrable gore-tex, ti-tanium, the very materials

the very elements deriding his archaic and moribund, his

self-deluding, draconian monolithic peppered ivory.