this is an article from 2015Lewis Porteous: The Poem
Psychologists tell us that having a meaningful job you enjoy is the best way to stave off dark thoughts, and seasoned Fringe reviewer Lewis Porteous has that in spades.
Why, only this Fringe he referred to comedians en masse as “an oppressive, self-centred, sporadically amusing establishment”. So far this Fringe he has used the words ‘bored’, ‘tedium’, ‘depressing’, ‘apathy’ ‘pointless’ and ‘meaningless universe’ ONLY 543 times in all , a 20 per cent reduction on last year and probably below the average for Fest reviewers. No doubt at all that Mr Porteous is one of the busiest and merriest reviewers on the Fringe and an absolute delight to have sitting right in front of you when you’re trying to make dehydrated people happy.
But did you know there’s a darker side to our favourite Fest hack? We cut all his reviews into bits (as many have done before), said a prayer to Absolutely Nothing Because Nothing Actually Exists In An Absurdist Universe You Idiot, and let the bits fall as meaninglessly and boringly and tediously as they liked. As we watched the pieces fluttering earthwards like brief cherry blossom on the last Spring morning of a dying child, we felt angry that it wasn’t all over yet. But then it was. And how!
What formed on the floor shocked us all: a beautiful poem comprised entirely from lines of Lewis Porteous reviews. This will rival T S Eliot’s The Waste Land for its sense of beautiful, bleak yearning. Enjoy!
THIS FEELS LIKE A PARODY
By Lewis Porteous
“I promise, you will never understand.”
Themes of teen isolation and urban decay,
On some otherwise unused wasteland
This feels like a parody, but it’s hard to say
Of what: The material he peddles is generally
Lightweight. And the work is haunted
By its own sense of possibility,
And we find ourselves disappointed
Inflexible gender roles and rampant xenophobia,
Tedious in the extreme
A delirious swirl of drunken onomatopoeia
However pretentious this line of thought seems
No sense of pay-off to the maddening tedium:
It would be valid to complain
Expressions justify use of a visual medium
We hear a disembodied voice say ‘again’.
This is dull, lifeless comedy, as practised by a man
A child’s rape fantasy
We sneer at those less cosmopolitan:
Stops short of being a must-see
This feels like a parody; a stuffy academic:
“Not all black people are the same”
But the expressions of boredom that greet his polemic
Feel a collective sense of shame
A blubbering infant is unsettling in the faces
Of overwhelming audience apathy
The faithful laugh in all the right places
Underpants which cling so we see
The outline of his penis; loses narrative focus
Regurgitating themes previously explored
Cancer will affect one in two of us
Then comes a lull and we find ourselves bored
A palpable tension hangs over the queue
There are surprises, callbacks and party games
A self-consciously dark drama school revue
But there’s no depth to its characters beyond their names
This feels like a parody, but it’s hard to say
It’s too bad he seems to lack
The casual slut-shaming that twice creeps its way
Into what could be considered the realm of the hack
Without a singular world view; identifiable quirks
The bearded berk muddles his intentions
Outside the pie factory in which he works.
As a group of teens gather in detention
This feels like eccentricity in the mundane
Any sense of gravitas thwarted
We hear a disembodied voice say ‘again’
And we’re back where we started.