THE POET AND HIS SPLEEN

This superficiality throttles me! The crowd has engendered a stultifying coercion to lie, has placed fatuity at its centre and consolidated its borders with hypocrisy, has knocked honesty from its precarious perch, replacing it with a society that reiterates seemly behaviour with the inanity of an insane parrot.

I have often felt compelled to discard those proud, egocentric gestures for something more candid, less theatrical, harder to beguile. I would rather people knew me as I am ... than as a caricature of society, a parody of docility in the ring of custom!