PROFOUND OPPROBRIUM

Words lose their meaning:
Their original meaning that is -
And over time, all the permutations 
Of their primal semantic inferences
Are befuddled, and words
Come to mean something else.

Take ‘Democracy’ (please!).
In Ancient Greece it was much 
Disparaged as rule by The Mob
And much later as some kind of
Janky representational farce
Founded on either The Mob

(In its best, purest form)
Or on wealthy land-owning 
Classes as in America
And other oligarchic states.
The Representatives, debouched 
By necessarily attendant ‘elections’

Then arranged themselves
In some sort of power-sharing melee
That eventually devolved
Post Eighteenth Century
Into a primarily binary and
Sometimes tertiary arrangement

Of a vaguely oppositional character.
This made for excellent theater
Reveled in by The Mob
And countenanced by the
Oligarchy as evidence that
Their ‘System’ was working -

That ‘System’ being the equivalent
Of the circuses promised by 
Roman Emperors to placate The Mob
Or, in contemporary parlance, The Street.
Given its reeking dubiety, as it is
Promoted by our Harlequin-like media 

Can we please enact a moratorium 
On the use of ‘Democracy’
At least until we shed ourselves
Of the tawdry illusions that surround it
And like the Greeks, accept it again
As a word of profound opprobrium?