Some musicians and actors strive so hard to be genuine and authentic, not matter how hard they have to fake it….

Artifice (What Price Hollywood?)
by Michael Romani

It's arguably corporeal
Slightly nostalgic and funereal 
The singer's veil is repurposed to a shroud
In the glitter of tension we recall

Singing songs unfelt in the soul
Dressing up mania as rock-n-roll
Sold out with the hook of being lost
All of this pretense comes at great cost

The public adores the internal dialectic
Displayed before an audience of the disaffected
Fame is its own monster under the spotlight
It's where the superficial hints at the expression of truth

There in all the shallow is the heart filled emptiness
Where the struggle to fake being real robs us of happiness
Flirtatiously free wheeling into the hardest core
It only begs the question of seeking out for so much more

Authenticity becomes a chronicle of complication
Between the simple and the subtle rests the implication
It's the statement of defeat offered in self abuse
That too often leads to the perverse and obtuse

Each of us costumes ourselves as we wish to be seen
But underneath all of this is the real human being
The nakedness underneath the sun seeks its out
While what passes for certainty is just a covering of doubt

Self afflicted wounds cannot tend to themselves
As record companies push to put records on the shelves
To survive, the shape shifter smashes into capitulation
And every bleeding soul loses life in the act of creation

(c) October 9, 2018  Michael Romani
All Rights Reserved

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