Irony’s Finest Hour

Irony’s Finest Hour

the artist said
irony 
tyrannizes
which 
like anything
taken in bad measure
even healthy skepticism
it can
and probably has

for some
the tyranny of irony
the ill
of postmodernism
the inoculation
yielding symptoms
overreactions
hypersensitivities
absurdities
necessary
in building the excess
of antibodies
of irony
needed for defense
when the real
illness 
comes

bitter irony
two-faced irony
debased in its extreme
while the researcher
describing its offspring
sarcasm
as our highest
form
of intelligence

tyrannical irony
offering no solutions
the eternal 
smug critic
yet
at the right time
the right place
in good measure
irony
immunizing
against
the insanity
of a dull world
seeking reasons
excuses
for its illness
which feels better
at least
than slow 
sober decay
in a world
without
excuses
and illnesses

in this world of panic
the sober ironist
detached
immunized
from the hysterias 
of today
protected
from the reasons
conclusions
clung to by fingernails
as somethings
more than nothing
for making sense
of all we can't know
and control

the terrors
of some others' freedom
and some others' authority
and technology
and medicine
and poverty
giving way 
to conspiracies
and lunacies
and even deeper 
darker
longer trenches
in our warfare
for control
to restructure
our institutionalized
insanities
once this threat
has passed

detached irony
detached cynicism
detached skepticism
all of it
smug
but there
to protect
from the werewolf's bite
of infecting
zealousness
giving us gangrenous feet
or hanging us in wire
picked apart by vultures
and dogs
in the no-man's-land
stuck and rotting
deep inside or between
a panicking world's
soggy trenches

irony
the vaccines
of our youth
building antibodies
still in our bloodstream
immunity for a lifetime
safeguarding
even in days
and seasons
when its measure's
not needed
attacking invaders
it's not designed to attack
since it knows nothing else
but immunity
false attacks
smearing the cause
of the real ironists
biding their time

then the attack
this one real
with irony and cynicism
still coursing through veins
offing no answer
but at least
in times like these
picking at locks
of the hysteric's
bolted doors
in their warfare
of making sense
of our world
according to
them

this warfare
of mania
and ideology
this battle
for their cure
becoming our cure
mainly 
for the well-being of themselves
to impose their comforting dreams
on all the dreamers
of all the different dreams

these fanatics
fetishists
of the security 
of locked doors
slamming ours too
to be trapped in their home
while the ironist
in his moment of glory
makes his stand
detached
cynical
sarcastic
critical
with his foot
stuck in the frame
of all those doors
needing so much
to be shut
and boarded
and locked