They talk about him all the time, the president. People love to talk about powerful people. The more powerful you are the more often you will be in the news, and the more often you are in the news, the more powerful you will be. With all that power, the president presides over smiles and war, is ageless, invulnerable and invincible to his followers. He says many words and these words are forged on anvils around which his staff sit assembled, with assembled smiles and assembled interests in power and self-interest. In such circumstances, there is little room for the vulnerable, for the afflicted and for those with loving words like puppy dogs on pouting lips. There is of course the shadow president about whom nobody talks. His words are not edited and not part of any establishment. His smiles are helpless and coincidental, and he wields no power. He is prone to love and vulnerability because he has dedicated his life to kindness and to displaying empathy. He has many friends in low places, many friends with illnesses and weakly hearts that count down every mortal beat, and he is deeply indebted to his powerless pals, celebrating their birthdays and crying on the days that they, one by one, are put in the ground, without another word ever spoken about them.

In the meantime, the president argues that love is dangerous, especially if acted upon in real life, and he puts out an edict that says, in so many words, that those who desire to be powerful, who aspire to be like him, should drop compassion and forgo hugs because both of these make one vulnerable to the demise of others which in turn requires tons of empathy. Those with empathy, he barks, can not wield true power. He now has the idea to model his entire state after the principles of lovelessness. Even harsher words are forged by those assembled around his newsroom anvil, and few sparks fly as free conversation dies. Isn’t it right that his followers should squeeze themselves into the exact tiny sweaty mould that his iron heart presides over? And never does he see that his followers, his entire millions, are growing smaller and deformed, are bleeding from the mouth and brain, shed toes and tongues. This, to the president, is a functioning state. Notions of rebellion are caught early on by his military-propagated eyes oozing dispassionate tears from every inch of the sky, like constantly buzzing lifeless birds. In a country thus wired every citizen soon grows tired, very tired.

Occasionally, the shadow president resorts to writing, little love letters and poems praising the world around him, the beauty of his friends, the nocturnal city, the lake under moonlight precisely lit up. He fancies himself a known poet every now and again, unsure of the motivation, perhaps wishing to be known a little bit, just like the president. He once, in his early years, forged a limerick in honour of his president, when early on in his reign camera smiles were still decoupled from war and decapitation. He was hopeful of receiving back a word of praise and kudos, something to show him that the service of loving words, of lip worship, was a worthwhile endeavour in the eyes of the all-powerful. But his lyrical sheet was stretched out across the anvil and tied tightly then tried unjustly. State censors bemoaned the lack of grammatical accuracy and the silly rule of jolly rhyme over strict metre, the sickening sugary loving tone, when serious expressions of praise should have reigned supreme. The shadow president shed a tear when his poem was returned in the mail, mutilated at the iambic genitals, lay tarred and feathered, and torn by red marker pen shrapnel. From that day onwards the poet walked in the shadow of the president and his freely expressed love sheets lay curtailed. The shadow president was born.

The newspapers in the meantime were littered with battlefields and honour and bloodbaths and always interspersed with the president’s sharp shrapnel smile, and death and silence became the celebrated objects in the new state. The shadow president marvelled at the official elevation of icy silence, and he wondered whether a link between death and power existed. But he remained open to, if not loving, then at least feeling sorry for the president.

He thought of all the true haphazard smiles the leader would never be able to break into, and he thought of all his people who lay scattered as numbers and body count and remained invisible and two-dimensional to him. Didn’t the president die to hug and be free as well, didn’t he yearn to admit that he suffered with cancer, that his entire anvil was a melancholy melanoma forgery, and didn’t he secretly wish to yield to the sickbed, to be visited by friends with care in their hearts for his condition like big blooming flowers, like lilies and wild roses, friends with few heartbeats left, heartbeats fully dedicated to his care. Didn’t his entire stiff staff and state apparatus yearn for the yielding of power through sudden springtime death and the expansion of the hearts of his squashed and quartered subjects?

The shadow president imagined that the president could only be free if he was given an entirely new sheet to speak from. In that moment, he knew what he had to do. In order to help the president he would have to send him a new sample of his writing, a speech like a giant hug, an uncensored hymn that spoke to him like a friend, like someone ready to take a bullet for a fellow sufferer of the human condition, albeit a very powerful one. He sat for days at his desk and looked out at the cherry blossom, and he sensed the worry of the tree of not being able to grow freely, to express its natural destiny in rosy petals. He watched the birds behave strangely in the sky, flying lowly, as if under the radar, attempting to avoid the president’s military eyes. And the trees rustled very little in the wind and canopies lay very still as if in anticipation of an alien landing or a tsunami. And the shadow president’s eyes grew moist because he hadn’t realised how far the ethos of curtailing nature had spread. There wasn’t a microorganism alive in the soil of the state today which didn’t feel the squeeze of the two-dimensional ideal, the asphyxiating editorial cuts of hugs and potent friendship. It was very simple, really.

He had to remind the president that he could say whatever he wanted. And in order to say whatever he wanted he would have to think as he pleased. And in order to think as he pleased he needed to connect with his people, and he had to give names to each individual perished on a battlefield, and he had to commemorate and commiserate every prisoner gasping a last wheezy breath inside the coiling walls of countless cold cells, both digital and made in scraping murals. Surely, he had to get rid of his censors and there wasn’t much point in an anvil either. This is what the shadow president would do, he wouldn’t give the all-powerful a ready speech, but merely pointers. Those would serve as more gentle reminders to align the internal needle with the ideal of freedom, rather than a crude letter, fully-cast. He would point out that whilst many state poets extolled the virtues of the president, he would remain unfinished until he invited love into his heart, and the state newspapers would gather dust on the shelves, and the shelves would decompose and would one day find new purpose in a land that invited in the sea and the grainy salt of friendship. And the shadow president wrote that he worried about the president, worried that without kindness he would miss many miracles, the illustrious flapping of butterfly wings, the lapping up of love on the meadows throughout his empire, like in the old days, when academic thought bloomed along with passionate kisses. Did he not remember those days? Wasn’t he a student of love at the university of life back then? The shadow president recommended that he’d saunter down the aisles of the central university – he used the word saunter as a remedy for all the marching terminology – saunter leisurely and recall how he made love freely with books and ideals and urged him to remember that when he was powerlessly in love with teachings and women he felt truly powerful. Only as slaves of love can we experience true power in our hearts, and as long as one lover mourns our passing we will never be forgotten, wrote the lowly hobby poet in view of the anxious blossom tree.

Of course, in answer to his letter he expected nothing short of decapitation. He expected to be edited into the grave, to be decimated and humiliated at every cipher, every serif, every punctuation mark. But if he could arouse doubt and a single question cloud in the mind of the silent and deadly president he would have succeeded, so he proceeded writing. The shadow president experienced the ticking timebomb of his outer shell as liberating, as he had little left to lose in a world tied into a thousand knots. He had much to say and precious little time to express it. He had things to say about the nature of true power which he believed was only derived from utter powerlessness. If the president depended on the fanfare of the news, then he was truly powerless without his array of media outlets. If he couldn’t stand upright without an army of tanks then he had no noteworthy legs. If he mistrusted his own people to the degree that the militant sky eyes watched over them at every given inch, then he was truly an untrusting coward, unable to breathe without the crutches of total control.

The more the shadow president wrote, the more he realised that his leader was the most powerless pitiful creature in the universe. Applauded by many, admired by none. The typing took him from anger to sadness into a rushing wave of laughter which saw him writhing on the floor. This president, powerful, really, how so, this takes the biscuit, this is not just far-fetched but fetched from the farthest stretches of the imagination, he really is nothing, and then he returned to silent tears, because not even the powerful-powerless president who could not embrace the switch to powerless-powerful deserved to remain unloved. And what was the point in sending a letter to a man who had an entire department of editors and columnists at his disposal to disprove the eminent findings of nature. Even with his letter transmitted, the birds would still fly low, the animals cowering in sad unison with the drooping heads of flowers, and the songs of love would be sung only quietly around campfires in remote regions of the empire, and once the fires were extinguished by the state police, would be proliferated by the morse-inspired thumping of shackled, naked feet and the clapping of grinning ex-lab monkeys.

Nature was resilient, and nature would in stillness and infinite generosity survive the great shadow that the current incumbent of the highest office cast over the hills and fields and valleys and cities of this ancient land. The shadow president rose from his powerless desk and cast one last glance over the fading enticing cherry foliage, and rushed to the letterbox, but was intercepted by the news that his best friend lay dying.

In that very moment he experienced the futility of his writing with total heft, dropped the letter, and ran a half-marathon to his friend’s house, arriving just in time to hold him in his arms, while death’ embrace on the other side grew stronger, wrestling him away. Someone new would be born brightly across the shadow of his death bed, and new microbes would supersede the sterility of the pitiful president with the empty heart. And the shadow president smiled as he relented powerless his pen and made his way into prison.          

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