The Paper Monument

They built his likeness from yesterday’s headlines and editorials
Praising his deeds, constructing heroism from recycled stories
A papier-mâché prophet, ten feet tall,
commemorating donations to the poor
While conveniently forgetting where the wealth came from
That let him look generous for sure
The statue stood in the town square
for fourteen days before the weather turned
And when the rain came down his paper face began to run
And everyone learned
That monuments constructed from publicity don’t withstand scrutiny or storms
They just dissolve revealing emptiness
where we’d projected idealized forms

Watch the paper hero melt into the gutters running black with ink
Watch the manufactured legend turn to pulp before we blink
This is what happens when you build your gods from press releases
When you confuse marketing with meaning
and the brand with what it greases
The statue’s weeping now but that’s just rain dissolving lies
Printed reputation can’t survive when anybody scrutinizes

The committee commissioned it with funding from his own foundation
A tax write-off disguised as civic duty performed with great sensation
They’d used his favorite photo from the magazine that named him man of the year
The one where he looks noble,
concerned about things people want to hear
But paper heroes have a fatal flaw their sculptors never mention
They can’t survive exposure to the elements or honest public attention
And so his face went first,
dissolving into streams of grey and black
Running down the pedestal like tears that couldn’t hold the fiction back
His paper hands that once reached out in frozen gestures of goodwill
Collapsed into themselves becoming soggy useless masses, still
While tourists took their photos of the melting benefactor’s form
The irony was perfect and completely unintended
That his legacy was just as fragile as the monument they’d rendered
Because the real man underneath the headlines was as hollow as the frame
Just wire and ambition wearing philanthropy like somebody else’s name

The rain revealed the armature underneath the newsprint skin
Just chicken wire and ambition and a desperate need to win
Approval from a populace too busy to investigate
The sources of his fortune or the workers he destroyed to generate
The profits he then donated fractional amounts of
While accepting accolades
and monuments and public outpourings of love
We stood there watching paper slip away in soggy chunks
Revealing that our hero was just wire and wet rot, who knew
How to manipulate the media into building myths from their donations
That were really just tax-sheltered gilding

By evening all that’s left is twisted wire and soggy lumps
Of headlines nobody will read about his charitable pumps
Of money into causes that conveniently bore his name
And suddenly we’re left wondering if we’re the ones to blame