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Obfuscation

Puppets found in the Bread & Puppet Museum in Glover, Vermont

Puppets found in the Bread & Puppet Museum in Glover, Vermont. By Redjar at the English-language Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

A skillful con man leaves
no evidence. Instead each
paper trail is shredded, burned,
flushed down any convenient

toilet. Frump doesn’t need
to clean them, fix the plumbing.
Little people do that invisibly.
His past is constantly revised.

A successful con man knows
people want to believe every
thing will be fine. A lie re-
peated works, he learned

from Goebbels. He decided
never to pay bills. Little
people in their tiny hovels,
invisible. He means to live

forever and eat the world
down to its rocky core.

Marge Piercy is the author of many books of poetry, most recently On the Way Out, Turn Off the Light (Knopf, 2020).
2022, Volume 73, Issue 11 (April 2022)
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