The Art Cathedral’s now reopened
And us lax sinners are admitted, slowly,
To the shrine, to gawp in studied reverence
At massive icons, now familiar as fossils,
Every last shocking atom of warm splattered flesh
Long since replaced by cold, hard sedimentary rocks of awe.
Improving catechisms on the walls remind us
Why we genuflect, and they’ve even done a reliquary
By the exit, full of Andy’s Wigs.
Though, shuffling in our masks,
It also starts resembling
A bad Venetian Carnival,
Put on by a prosaic doge,
Slashing costs in Plague Time,
The kind of Saturnalia
No one ever yearned for
In high dreams as they queued up
Outside of Studio 54
Buzzing in a blizzard.
Still, on the way there, Compostela-ing
Towards the station, I mentioned how,
Back in the 70s, it seemed for weeks
The nation was convulsed with rage
About a show on ITV profiling Warhol;
Mrs Whitehouse and the McWhirter Twins
Armed to their crooked teeth with righteousness
Behind their barricades of bibles,
Battling for our souls to guard
Our morals from this Tide of Filth -
What we had, when I was young,
Instead of on-line lynch mobs
Gibbeting each fresh affront
To everyone’s hairtrigger tears.
Rose sighed and with facetious genius said
“I wish that I could go back to the 70s,
The Time Before Lies.” I laughed.
“They lied then too,” I lied.