Untitled
Where have the poets gone?
They lie lifeless,
Under smouldering earth
Scalded with critics savage tongues
these poets who
bruised and beaten by conformity
cast aside
buried by the nations
that had once embraced their thought.
Where are the actors?
They hide behind synthetic smiles
as Dionysis wails.
The playwrights gone
never to touch quill to parchment
Shakespeare's dead!
Be glad he cannot see the folly
of our new diversions
union of comedy and trajedy
create a warped "reality"
'Tis the death of literature
The bard thrashes in his dusty grave
as whispers of this atrocity
fall on dead ears.
Where is the artist?
He has been murdered by his patron
Dagger veiled in apathy's venom
(a toxin most potent to the creative soul)
thrust through his heart
He staggers to find his place beside the poet
Where are the musicians?
Gone before all the others,
locked away in padded rooms
their blasphemous melodies
heard only by the walls themselves.
In the end they stood stiff-legged on stage
and played as they were told,
untildriven mad by monotony
they were psychopaths and criminals.
Meanwhile politicians smirk
and pledge illusion from their soapboxes
Like Macbeth's weird sisters
they juggle words to "lie like truth".
The puppeteers beside them.
The corporations who slayed the artist
with their cheap reproductions
who's mass production
tossed the poet to obsoletion
who built the Camazotz
that drove the musician mad.
The creative are scorned.
Children's eyes are turned by anxious mothers
Men scorn them
and youth spit upon the wretched paupers
who beg only for a hearth on which to rest
their weary world-worn feet.
But there is none.
They are taken
the liberated workers have them all
in their indestinguishable Camazotz,
liberated from free thought.
Even Aldous Huxley could not forsee
such a brash and brave new world as this.
Its children laugh when they ought to weep,
drink in gaiety when they should be somber,
And all else, when they would do better to cry to their pillows.
But there is no perfection
and inspiration can't be quelled.
A man speaks to the nations,
and his inspired words turn to prose
and brim over his unsuspecting lips,
to crash and break upon his audiences ears.
His speech is a torrent of emotion
a hurricane of meaning
which he conveys to those
who stand, awestruck
against a hail of words
and downpour of beauty.
It is too late once he sees what he has done,
and the winds cease to nothingness
as a silence envelopes the earth.
There is nothing
No thought
No action
No breath
And when it seems that life has ended
Feebly, faintly, distantly
...a haunting tune carries through the heavy air.
It is near
and far
and nearer still,
it is everywhere,
and nowhere at all.
It is a fiddler
who comes
neither from the earth
the heavens
or the sea.
He is bent and brittle,
withered with the age
that slows his march
one step at a time
through town.
His song has neither beginning
nor end,
and a timid singer joins him
having boldly abandoned
the concrete monster
behind who's walls she hid.
Her soft voice adds to his haunting tune.
They pass the cemetary
The poets grasp at their graves
to pull themselves above ground
and are born from the earth
with quill and parchment in hand.
inseperable.
The artist, neglected,
hears it too, and rises to paint a new Mona Lisa
The musicians flow like precious water
from alleyways
in pursuit of this strange procession
and the song wafts from the aylum's windows.
The pied piper with his haunting tune
approaches the masses,
and as this solemn parade approaches
the asctors step from the crowd
and remove their masks
struting proudly to join their kind
The song fades slowly
as does the piper,
inaudibly
but it is there.
It has always been there.
It only rises from the ashes, reborn.
