Critics, Who Feeds Them?

A Poem by Duncan Brown

Let me tell you something pilgrim

Straight and to your copied paste
That thing masquerading as a face
On the elongated slope of your Janus
For you that's just the perfect place.

The world needs a dramatic critic
Like the desert needs more sand
And secondary literature more bland
Always needs another helping hand
To slap it on the key shaped shifter.

In all things pertaining to writing
Bribery's cool but flattery's not
The way to fuel the imagination.
Filthy lucre can be an inspiration
Filthy loookers a mere distraction

A journey to a place poetic of literature
Is for so few the metered pilgrimage
Undertaken by many a scurrilous rascal
Disguised in critical converse writing
So uncritically stereotyping themselves.

The mother of all of typing errors
Dispatched by the gods to scare us
Into thinking they must the genius
Scribbling down their magnum opus
By lining it up their own proboscis

Stained glass shades at the ready
Holy writ is on their sacred menu
In the cathedrals of the mediocrity
Their vicious verb is very acapella
Only the lonely write in melodrama.

To be a critic is not to be in Hamlet
Or anything else that really matters
It's a life disguised as a T.S Eliot
Hurling anagrams at the geniuses
Writing truth in all things beautiful.