Synkroniciti is pleased to welcome the first of our “Patterns” artists, poet and writer Michael Alcée of New York. “Have You No Sense of Decency, Sir?” is a poem about the human tendency to rally around a bully.
“Like clockwork, it calls to us,/ one man’s siren/ song turns anthem, mockingbirds/ gone mad and always aimed/ at foreign tongues.”
Drawing a parallel between dictators of the past and modern leaders, he laments the ease at which we fall into patterns of crudeness and cruelty. Memory is erased by allegiance. If you are reading the news today, you will see a proliferation of strongmen in large countries, of governments ignoring and rescinding basic human freedoms without due process.
“In truth, the thing without/ feathers: despair.”
How do we resist a pattern so ingrained, a pattern which makes those in power feel safe?
Read “Have You No Sense of Decency, Sir?” in Synkroniciti’s “Patterns” issue, Vol. 7, No. 4, available for purchase here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Michael Alcée’s work has appeared in Aphor, Quarter Press, and San Antonio Review and is forthcoming in Eunoia Review, Black Iris, and Inflectionist Review. In addition to being a poet, he is a psychologist and author of Therapeutic Improvisation (Norton, 2022) and The Upside of OCD (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024).