Not My Prime Minister
An original poem
“He’s not my Prime Minister”
The words echoed in the room
It all sounded sinister
Like a dark impending doom
But they stirred me from my reverie
Bore a hole into my brain
They seemed to drip with treachery
I quietly mouthed them again
“He’s not my Prime Minister”
Five words layered like an onion
A conundrum wrapped in enigma
From which a sermon could be written
The earworm continued burrowing
Down the rabbit hole I plunged
Had I lost my reasoning abilities?
Was I mentally challenged?
Perhaps I had unwittingly
Changed my geographical location
Did I no longer live in a democracy?
A blink-of-an eye migration
Has society become so polarized?
Sharply split between us and them
Division now romanticized
An ironic ad hominem
Why not build a bridge between us and them
A place of dialogue and discourse
Or is this universal absurdism
Leaving us with no other recourse?
He may not be your Prime Minister
But he represents the will of the majority
We may choose to assassinate his character
But we must respect his authority
We can malign the office bearer
Criticize all the tries to say and do
He is not a king, he’s no emperor
He’s accountable to me and you
But the Office that he represents
Is the seat of our democracy
And it is not by coincidence
We must “stand on guard for thee”
Just because we don’t see eye to eye
Just because we are “opponents”
Does not mean we are enemies
That is cognitive dissonance
Bio: Brian Sankarsingh is a Trinidadian-born Canadian immigrant who moved to Canada in the 1980s. He describes himself as an accidental poet, with a passion for advocacy and a penchant for prose, an unapologetic style, he offers his poetry as social and political commentary.
