a poem for the God of Theatur

setting:

      Settling in over appetizers and absinthe, seated in an august university music hall: an audience of beautifully-dressed and assortedly distinguished, connected, or moneyed individuals most fervently and even piously await the arrival and performance of the resurgent Greek composer Pan.

     Drowning in the buzz of rising fashion's flood, a small-army of sophisticated yet malleable ears lust with sophisticate and savage fire to hear the Greek genii's new compositions; For some, their worlds will change... immediately, or over 2 or 3 years, just from this music, or only after fusion with some other powerful Daemon: the ageless, barely touched diamond-mines of true philosophy, the love of a nubile and cunning young Venus risen dark and di-splayed from the rushing foam of mankind's earliest oceans or perhaps the gladiatorial calling of the modern jurist: a lust for justice for the wronged and vulnerable, or perhaps for the paying, conceivably innocent client... One will flee law-school for the jungles of Cameroon, to hide and compose sweeping symphonies of: gazelle, tiger, monkey, vine, magic, cloud.

      Another will be a better dynastic red-rose, will continue to follow her fated, hated gray-career, will socialize primarily in her robotic Fear City orbit, and will repetitively pose cheerfully with her golden reputation of a father and others for the newspaper articles so far from her heart. But for the flute, she had a young Spaniard's passion, and would be as true as a Swiss lion. Her diaries will reflect on this performance: this night. She will feel and study the symphonies, and pay other scholars to do so, fund fellowships for Flautists with some small aspect that echoes of the master. They will do this as the cupid-bit young Count will respond to insults with ships of roses and gems, will plead in pianissimo and grovel in sonnets... as the increasingly wealthy young Bavarian Architect will, called to do battle for The Father Land, leave his secure world of familiar beauty not with horror, sadness, or fear, but more often with Mars-in-his-eyes, humming Wagner... dreaming of glorious young American enemies who like-wise dream of them. Lusting for medals with cars and girls, or filled with the intoxicating frenzy of victorious patriotism, the bravest will storm The Panzers with only light-arms in all the handsome beauty and inscrutable mania of youth... some blown to bloody, ugly carcasses of glory as the half-defeated meth-sped gunner turns his turret and fixes on one more of a plethora of easy, over-confident targets.

      Many of the privileged aesthetes in the hall tonight, like many from all circles, palaces, and hovels of humanity, will never storm the enemy line for honor or passion, nor will find such savage and sacrificial love or passion for anything individual: not the melodic divinity of Tchaikovsky, nor the sagacious worldliness of Shakespeare, not for Christ's call to feed, save, and clothe the wretched, lost, and barbarous. And, no, not even for themselves, especially not for themselves... even though it be a matter of art not profit. But often, spinning on this vast, uber-anarchic globe, to truly excel and rise above both the swamp and the parlour-room, we must allow ourselves a madness and savage passion for our art... or better yet for many arts and peaks of art, which may mix and flow into our own, just as valorous souls unscared of disease and death do take many beautiful lovers... similarly but far better, we should allow many great spirits(composers, generals, poets,) to take us on their flights of victory, slavery to beauty, obsession with detail and excellence, their tired turns to the opium angels and strange drug spirits: and even in these times: hear the arias!, see Guernica!

      Others will drift on in the labyrinth of verdant indoor gardens, always eloquent lectures illuminating this or that black-mind-cave, savory artistic entrees appearing daily as if by magic, always clever candied canvas conceptualizations, coy-fish ponds... younger, intriguing new faces speaking fire-works displays of apparent new ideas and inspirations... but by now they know that true culture and intelligence: like art, learning, sex, beauty, magic, and love, are like the rarified fruits and blooms of certain high mountainous jungles.

       Once passed by, and left for the always greener low-foliage, for the bright orange, yellow, pink vines, for the blue frogs, the electric beetles, the eponymous villages of bamboo-huts well known to the world's minority of independent travelers, still an endless mongrel army. Once you've slept in these palaces of primitivity, drank colas with old native farmers, sad saintly young soldiers and cigarette-savoring Buddhist monks... or perhaps even like the rare evil western traveler (sic,) enticed and begged by one's simple dark-graced hosts with many young mouths to feed, you may have even oped your bamboo-door and that to your soul and shared your soft-bedding with their dark young beauties, shared the barbarous panting of intimate penetrations, afterwards painting their glowing-pink flowers in oil against the deep-blackness of their lithe and nubile forms.

Pan tunes his bone-pipes
for the working-class waywards
outside Haydn Hall        (haiku)

done, he shares rum's flame
with a grizzled old poet,
and a pink Mohawk        (haiku)

a college-student
(with a stretched black ear-stud) eyes
the pink-Mohawk girl       (haiku)

the master scrawls his
' P ' for two tiny ladies
beneath Pa giant          (haiku)

The rum-lit poet
entrances Pan with haiku
from his crazed travels (haiku)

soon the Profs could not
unfix their master from his
mongol-eyed oracle          (haiku)

finally, a suit
with blonde-mane lures the goat
onto the main-stage         (haiku)

outside, the ranks swell
with new 'smoker's bridge' beasts... and
a dread-locked Math prof         (haiku)

the latter glances
round Pink-Mohawk, lights a smoke...
out storm the flute-notes           (haiku)

the prof shakes her glove.
the girl smiles down from cloud 9.
soon, she comes along             (haiku)