There’s little as sexy as stupidity 

damping down the depth of A B or C 

to be more mailable. 

Virtue comes with the simple message 

that culture hasn’t just ate itself 

as made a meal out of the banal: 

Warhol’s tinned split pea soup 

Double Elvis 

Diamond Dust Shoes 

All skyscraper high, filling walls. 

All of it all a show, 

that there’s as much beauty 

in consumerism, than there is 

in any past master’s brushstroke 

or sainted conceptual design. 

The season of the idiot 

is a marked card 

of surface over feeling. 

Wilde once said: “All art is quite useless” 

We’ve run with that one 

we have lost not the tools 

but the expertise, the craft 

that finished with Art Deco. 

There is no different between what’s popular and what’s avant garde 

Marx tells a friend over a pint of stout 

“True life, true work, is being able to see yourself reflected in your labour.” 

Warhol checks his reflection, 

tells Marx his 15 minutes are up. 

Wilde searches the stars for inspiration 

But they are just orbs of rock and gas. 

Baubles on a universal chain, 

always there, but seldom understood, 

so many lost to light pollution, 

from all the TV sets and phone devices. 

If we are really in the gutter, we are still head dug into the screens 

We use to make ourselves seem whole.