Real Appearance

Wash off the over-soaked Mexican Soaps

Gag Tyra and all irritating talking traps

Plague public theatres—the epicentre of tramedies—

The youth’s mind, they corrupt and addle.

Sweep them clean of its melodramatic poems

Wipe out Homerians and blow up every weeping

Tragedians. And from page to stage,

Slash Shakespearean texts. Destroy his

Masquerades and those appearances of reality.

Acting, performing, sketching, singing,

And in fact all dramatic imitations

Are quite far removed from the truth

The plastic audience, engrossed in puerile art form

Excited like a goldfish in an aquarium

Blast the disdainful banal world of popular

Public performance. Where common people,

Charitably drawn, to peevish and

Surreal characters, are objects of satire!

                                            

Stab mortally Odysseus and his villains

For misrepresenting historical figures

Hang every Iliad hero for depicting turbulent events

While engaging in such questionable display

Of emotion as spinning out long melancholic lamentations

So disfiguring themselves in grief.

Bear not such intimate sorrows, condone them not.

Murder Hamlet. Slay Macbeth. Heed Plato:

‘If you receive these pleasure-seasoned

Muse, of song and epic, drama and poetry,

Speeches and soliloquies,’ he admonished,

‘Pleasure and pain will be kings in your cities,

Instead of law, logic and reason.’

Esteem the cold sweeping pronouncements

Of apostle Wilde summed up in his most

Unholy anti-arts argument: ‘All art is quite useless.’

But then, wasn’t he merely an elitist

Double agent of art? In his dark epistles?

When he began with a poetic onslaught,

And ended up writing one too many.

Cancel poetry readings and censure live theatres

There being free and accessible and raucous,

Gives them an extremely popular status.

Ban all mass entertainment. Instead of comedy

And poetry, and Socrates and Sophocles,

Read NY Times, listen to BBC and watch Al-Jazeera.

Reconstruct a Plato Republic, empty of all libraries

Theatres, cinemas and museums. Destroy all repositories

Of art, in case, God forbid, they have survived the Dark Ages.

Revive Plato’s personal utopia—that dream that never came

To pass! Disguise not your true disgust when it comes to art.

What art! What artistic expression! What inferior characters!

What art! What vulgar subjects! What corrupted audience!

What art! What confusion between appearance and reality!

©roundsquare.