Tag Archives: appearances

What good is art

What good is art if it does not instruct,
or for our “better angels” cast new wings
beyond utilitarian design,
reminding us that beauty without form
is doomed, under the sheer weight of itself
to force its rigid framing to collapse?

Art is like all religions, in that all
are but a generation from extinct;
the evolution of a form requires
that it do more than simply change its clothes,
grow gills and fins to swim in altered seas
or learn to hunt new game to feed its young.

What good are schools if they do not provide
a context beyond simple black and white,
and offer views of different paradigms
where parasites are not the food chain’s end?
That corpse is sucked of marrow, and its bones
are far too fragile to host us for long.

The arts are an essential to the whole:
without creative outlet, we are chained
to follow, sullen, on pathways not our own
in search of some elusive, unknown truth
that if found, will be meaningless, or worse,
to our imagination’s limits, dead.

What good is any dogma that insists
on praising uniformity’s facade
while damning the poor souls behind those bars
whose torment is to see outside the cage,
and fed on lies of common brotherhood
to mutate into monsters, thugs, and whores?

True culture does not denigrate the arts
if it intends to do more than survive;
and Beauty, unappreciated, dies,
its empty shell an ugly, barren waste.
What good then is mere rhetoric that claims
some great prize as its end, by any means?

16 May 2005

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The Wall

There is something in a family that doesn’t like a wall
inside the boundary it constructs, its face against the world,
that thin veneer of solidarity presented to conceal
or pander to the social mores ranking its esteem.

Behind the bastions of normalcy, its main concern
is making sure the single units pretend to conform;
and in that monitoring, it wants no separate, secret lives,
accepting only hesitantly strangers from outside.

Each strained reunion of the brood is subject of concern;
and any bricks laid on in private are quick set upon
with sledgehammers of guilt, and picks of hinting, sly reproach,
each proud attempt to isolate examined and destroyed.

Against this force of silent judgment, one who would be free,
seeking an authenticity outside accepted norms,
must toil in dark and secret, lest their labors be discovered
and hung, a warning pike along the outer fortress wall.

The separate self the enemy the hoarding family fears.
And so with subtle sabotage it works into new bricks themselves
the shale of doubt, and shunning stones to weaken each new plan
until in desperate surrender only the whole survives.

And distance, what is that to it, that reaches beyond time
across the generations, fingers clutching, like ivied vine
that resists even violent axes to grow back anew
and cover each new wound, and scar, with uniformity.

Its cry to arms is “Unity against the gathered hordes
that seek to infiltrate and then betray us from within,”
and with that xenophobic fervor fights to quell, subordinate,
the individual desire to reach outside its grasp.

There is something about family that doesn’t like a wall
within its defined boundaries; it challenges the whole.
And each new member must accept their assigned sentry role
or despite years of effort, its well-maintained castle falls.

27 MAY 2004

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