A disguise is an alchemical infusion
For a golden disguise can materialize only
In the realm of cultural signifiers
Where merely to assert a transformation
Is to effect a transformation

Take for example the driver
Of the undeniably beautiful tan Mercedes
A joy forever but an irresponsible expenditure
If that’s not jumping to a moralizing conclusion

So one must proceed patiently
And perhaps even methodically
The driver is a person with a personality
And doubtless with an identity
A place on the sexual spectrum
And other psychographic determiners

But all personalities are multiple
And hence a certain personality disorder
Is endemic in this mobile age
Or put more mildly identity shifts
With shifting social situations
Which technologically enabled have grown complex

There was a time there still are times
When social situations were small and interactive
Crowds were rare and governed by stern prescriptions
And the faithful in the cathedral showed a certain stasis
Uninflected by display except from on high
For the masses lacked the resources for scenic presentation
And now in this modular age
All the world’s a portable proscenium

All is performance and ever was
All that has changed is the scale
But do we in the role of spectator possess
The interpretive skill to make sense of it all
And what is interpretation anyway

We can’t know motives
But to place an expensive object in a public place
To move it from place to public place
Has to be some sort of sumptuary display

It has to be an aggressive act
Or at least an unappreciative act
Unappreciative both of beauty and of persons
And their will to respond perhaps variously to beauty

But here all interpretation is forbidden
And you shall know only I am a rich man

How profoundly different from the acts of that sickly youth
Poor small unacquainted with the world who cries
Oh for an age so sheltered from annoy

I am not Keats I am not Blake I am not Wordsworth
Not Yeats not Dickinson not Whitman not Wilde
Not Hendrix not Keef not Wolf not Muddy
Not George Eliot not Thomas Mann not Samuel Johnson
Not Bessie Smith or Bob Johnson or Bob Dylan
Or Habermas or Parfit or Kant or Socrates
Definitely not Socrates

I am the dirty monk who owns things
And has no pride of ownership
The overweight ascetic who does things
And doubts their rightness or efficacy

That hell is other people is a banal thought
True only insofar as each person is a demon
Myself am hell says the true prophet of the age

We demons love to shift our shapes
Dog monkey orchid goat leopard snail nightshade
You don’t have to buy a Mercedes