The Celebrity Virus 

Perhaps some ignorance was once all kindness;

nothing known of the homes, the routines of the rich

beyond distant frames made by flattering sunsets;

the safest of myths live in flightless skies.

Cameras removed from the new sans-culottes

a necessary first, breaking into the palace

to stand, transfixed in life-changing paralysis

by a cocktail of speechless rage and wild wonder.

Now the new chosen, the media mannequins,

dance their butterfly lives like a taunting

while the millions of faces, strained against railings,

eat negative envies in lung-load doses.

Mothers, tensioned to weariest extremes,

just to hold back the humdrum day from anarchy;

fathers, rope-walking the middle-aged bridges

over death chasms, leeched on to bleeping machines;

youths, fresh dreams growing with limbs,

slapped savagely down by an angry reality;

girls, who have made themselves warm, misty places,

crushed that their beauty cannot be enough

and so, on it rumbles, the daily parade,

grotesque painted faces in tutored illusions

picking their gold from the back of the cash cows

even as they are mooing their soft adulations.

The all mighty now, an idol of indolence,

a trivia god in the teeth of apocalypse,

the celebrity virus spreads its infections,

soaking hopes in sad contamination.

To be objects of worship, ideals and legends;

to be pictured, pedestalled, imitated in flattery,

however modest the apparent accomplishment,

however transparent the alleged distinction.

The fear-wielding priests have all been sent packing;

the kings, lords and nobles are steeped in derision,

but where we have run to is still wild with demons,

goblin dancing across human hearts.