The
Fall of Oscar Wilde
Low
hanging fruit, a family feud,
a
misspelled note, a libel suit,
mock
indignation and ire,
to
please your lover liar,
a
bullet made for you to fire.
Sling
enough mud they say....
Sling
enough mud, it sticks,
exactly
what the Marquis did!
Like
you he paid the boys in gifts
for
services rendered, to lift the lid
off
your desires – and so
the
gun backfires again.
O
the irony of it!
Haughty
speech and florid prose,
he
took the stand to maintain,
some
aesthetic pedagogic pose,
became
so voluble on
the
love that dare not speak,
claimed
to mentor and to teach.
Though
I think it was less Latin,
something
more like Greek.
It
amounted to a guilty plea.
And
working class boys
pretty
and expendable,
off
the Piccadilly meat-rack
could
go to the highest bidder and aren't
yet
loyal or dependable when a better
offer's
on the table, or perhaps
a
worse threat.
Each
man kills the thing he loves.
Outcasts
always mourn. From
Pentonville,
Reading & Gaulic exile,
poured
overwrought remorse.
Talk
of true nobility in suffering -
The
Soul of Man Under Socialism,
De
Profundis, repudiate and deny
a
view you once endorsed,
that
art was beautiful lies.
Cursing
penury and fuelled
by
whiskey absinthe and gin,
dying
in the hotel d'Alsace
under
another name,
It
was shooting yourself
in
the foot that ultimately did you in.
Well,
that and the wallpaper,
so
it's claimed.
