So I'M Watching Chaplin's Limelight Poem by Michael Pruchnicki

and the TV flickers black & white
the great actor of his day
enunciating every syllable
as the tension mounts
and I think

but I don't really think
as Aristotle did
I simply lay back
and go with the languid tyranny
that Orwell warned us about
and say to myself
what the hell!
so we'll be marched off
to Obama's gulag
before you can awake
in alarm

would you answer
the knock on the door
my dear
those bayonets aren't
meant to harm at all