The debate.

The candidates were civil
But the words were not.
Angry words flew around the room
With atrocious adjectives
Chasing frightened nouns
Into hiding
Near the camouflaged adverbs.
Still, the nouns were hunted down
And forced to surrender
During the escalating spoken warfare.
As the debate progressed,
The nouns began their revenge,
Firing punctuation marks
At the surprised adjectives.
The adjectives retaliated
By launching numbers
To distort the information
Way out of proportion
With exaggeration.
The confused audience
Made no sense of the words
Amid the chaos on stage
And in the surrounding air.
Finally the debate ended
With the candidates shaking hands
To polite applause
But the words attempted final chokeholds
Before following their hosts
Out of the building
To begin an imaginary ceasefire
And to begin preparations
For the next battle
In the neverending verbal war.