Once a Weaver

The poet’s not the world’s only deceiver:
Lies everywhere and always, nowhere, never,
In any helpless moment whatsoever.
Consider monsters like the deep believer,
A butcher who claims he was once a weaver:
“I’m looking for a finger to dissever,”
He says to us, thinking it’s oh so clever,
Flashing above his head a bloody cleaver.

So shrive him in the shrine, where he will shrivel,
Shrink, shrug into his semblance of a shroud.
Once he was shrewd, and shrill; no longer proud,
His will was shredded, so that now he’s civil,
Having given up shrapnel and drivel,
And wears a shrub in his lapel, lewd and loud.