Four short lines, no capital letters, no full stops, and a whole argument about government fits inside. The title hands down the verdict, "Parliament of fools", and the lines that follow read like the evidence.
The first two lines set up an equation: "a parliament with a pen is / a parliament of paper". It sounds almost like a tautology, since give a parliament a pen and of course it produces paper. But the word "parliament" comes from the French *parler*, to speak, so an assembly that was meant to talk has become one that writes. The phrase "on paper" also suggests something that exists only in theory. A parliament of paper makes rules and records but may never touch the people it governs. Notice the p-sounds that run through the couplet: *parliament*, *pen*, *parliament*, *paper*. They keep the lines tight and a little smug, like a bureaucrat stamping the same form twice.
The poem's shape adds to the effect. The lines shrink, from eight syllables to seven, then seven, then six. The first line ends on the small, unemphatic word "is", so the sentence hangs in mid-air until the next line completes it. After that, the third and fourth lines each stand alone, like pronouncements. The poem seems to be running out of room, and by the end, fittingly, out of ink.
The third line is where the poem turns playful and sharper: "an ow comes out of each owe". Take the final *e* off "owe" and you get "ow", so the line does what it says, and the cry literally comes out of the word. The pun also carries the poem's moral. "Owe" means debt, and handling money and obligations is a large part of what parliaments do. The "ow" is the pain of someone on the receiving end. Decisions that look tidy on paper become debts, and debts hurt real people. The speaker never says this outright. The two sounds sit side by side, and readers can make the connection themselves. There may also be a faint bird in the background. A "parliament" is a collective noun for owls, and "fools" sounds a little like "fowls", so the title may be nudging us toward that image. That is an inference from the sounds, since the poem never names an owl.
The last line, "how to think with no ink", pulls the earlier sounds together. "How" rhymes with "ow" from the line before, and "no" echoes "owe". The most striking move is inside "think", which already contains "ink". Remove the ink and only "th" is left, so the word shows how dependent thought is on its written form. The line can be read in several ways: as a how-to title, as a real question, or as a taunt aimed at the fools of the title. Perhaps a parliament that lives on paper has forgotten how to think without it. Or perhaps the poem is making the opposite point, that it has just done some thinking with almost no apparatus at all, only sound and a few lowercase words.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. It names no particular government and tells no story, so the satire can apply broadly to any institution that confuses documents with action. It also argues through wordplay, not statement. The pun on "owe" and "ow" is the criticism, not a decoration added to it. And it leaves work for the reader. We have to hear the missing *e*, spot the hidden "ink", and decide whether the final question is despair or a dare. A poem this small rewards being read slowly, and being read aloud, since its best jokes live in how the words sound.