Wild above rule or art, enormous bliss.

—John Milton, Paradise Lost

 

We are stardust.

We are golden.

And we have to get ourselves

back to the garden.

—Joni Mitchell, Woodstock

 

 

Dramatis Personae

 

Nigel, British, a philosopher, mad genius who does his best thinking on the water, his synapses lit by whatever panorama or cityscape is on display before him.  He has a theory he thinks might save us from ourselves.

 

Geezerman, iconic poet of the Sixties, once nearly forgotten, now reinserted into public consciousness by the world-famous DJ Doc Holiday, and cloaked in what is either a mysterious connection to the ethers, or incipient dementia.  At 78 he has gained the biggest audience of his life: hipsters and acolytes seeking in his poems a door to salvation.  His voice is a rasp that hints at years wandering deserts and prairies of the windblown West, and fits with a supple, surprising snugness among techno beats amplified to earsplitting decibel-levels.

 

Leon, Athens, GA neo-hippie, has a gift for remembering the quotes of inebriated musicians, actors, and literati, and spinning them into lively, lucid prose.  A rising pop-culture scribe, he hunts big game for Rolling Stone, and currently has Geezerman in his sights, but finds himself nearly as drawn to the old bard as are the legions of fans he is writing for.

 

Katrina (Kat) Quicksilver, sometime model, party-girl, turner of heads, abuser of substances, dances—seductively, blissfully unaware—at the vortex of a storm that could end the world as we know it (and she feels fine.)

 

DJ Doc Holiday, from Santa Barbara, trust-funded former world big-wave champion, now messiah of EDM true-believers the world over, is attempting, through his otherworldly psychedelic mixes, to translate the voices he heard while being pummeled nearly to death by the fists of the ocean’s deadliest curl.  He now wants to ride sound-waves to that Nirvana promised, but never delivered, by the remote breaks he used to surf.  Hearing Geezerman read brings him to his knees.  This is the voice he heard in the depths, voice of the ages, the voice to deliver the planet’s final warning.  The mesmerist finds himself mesmerized.

 

Buzz is a bouncer with a secret talent.

 

Diane knows you better than you know yourself.

 

The characters, though not always physically on location, speak from the sidewalk, dance floor or DJ booth of The Go-Kart Klub, a commodious, state-of-the-art dance emporium.  Bodies in colorful states of undress and distress writhe and jerk to loud and intricately-woven tapestries of sound, mixes which transport them to places they have never even imagined.   A new song, though one with a beat as old as the earth itself, throbs to life under the club’s pulsing lights, and unknown to anyone, is being broadcast to every device on the planet. Tonight is going to be special.  Nothing will ever be the same.

 

 

Prelude:  (DJ Doc Holiday)

 

History, my babies, is a torch to the foot,

a sad tattoo, a wave

that has us pinned in its grip, like a mouse

‘neath a catspaw.  But the history

that happens to you is ours: a gift to give.

A song to play.  A cloud to rain.

So very soon we will open a vein, spill

the beans, the beats, the Word.

We will chant holy, holy, usurp the bloody

church, unglop you from the damning dollop

of almighty dollar, and unleash upon you

a deluge: flowerbomb to seed the Eden

in which you will awaken, the radio-active

fallout of rhymedance and melody

where you can shake your beauty

to a new flavor of groove, grow fat on song,

fit on dance, converse in verse, make a bed

of your own meaning, dream safe a gleaning

unshackled from the syllables of shame.

We came, we saw, we concurred,

we have conquered the kind of night where

shadow sells shadow to darken the doorstep

of your every, the dubstep of your day,

filch then and profit from your blindness.

My babies, hark!  We will trip the switch, flip

the script, and illuminated, you’ll be kissed

as if by a brand-new sun.

 

The words you then recite will be your own.

 

 

 Act One—The End of In the Beginning

 

I put the jizzum in neologism.

—Martin Schmutterer

 

You’re not invisible now, you just don’t exist.

—The Shins, The Rifle’s Spiral

  

(Nigel: lecturing to an entranced and baffled university philosophy class)

 

 

Though we will never arrive, Hypermodicumism

(my grand theory) brings us ever closer

and with great speed to where stupormodels,

cosmogleeked out of their skullbeanies, caper,

taffymad amid the wraparound hydrangea.

Just look at them!  Thongrapt and strapless, half

in the bag, happy clamlings cluttering

the Décolletage Mahal.  Sheikhs and phreaks splish-

splash the sleek chlorinatorium—ogle and ogre:

breastfed cherubim adorning the acreage—deco-

paged paroxysms of porcelain, prenixonian

tileage so very cerulean against the fluffy, fluffy

towels! Purr and jiggle, slur and giggle, and only

the occasional drowning….

 

 

(Geezerman, Leon: Leon is enduring some sort of sauna/sweatlodge experience as part of an in-depth interview with the reclusive and mysterious poet.  Like Nigel, they tend to reinvent the English language as they go along.)

 

 

Bushquackery?  Well, the witch-doctors

invented it, but, like Adam—bygod!—I named it.

 

It was hard to argue, skeezixed unto puddlement

in the hellish heat, slamdazzled by shards

of ancient elkfizzle haunting the old man’s eyes

looming brimful and strangely Latinate

behind fedgenspecs tinged cadmium, lenses

sweat-slaloming nostrilward.

 

Geezerman, he listed all catatonic, Carpedoomian

as dusk descended.

 

Yeah, I’ll admit, the lot of us, we were goiter-

mongering: gadflown, brimstoned and batshit,

humdingering sulfuric under the fat and forever

retreating sun, me, searching for a scoop that never

seems to come.

 

 

(DJ Doc Holiday, Kat, as another night begins, Buzz maintaining order at the club)

 

 

Blingstapled and bedecked, Buzz patrols

the perimeter: black t-shirt, black jeans,

postmodern musculature amplified

and animated; tattooned and Tweetyfied.

Puddy-tats ninelife his biceps

as he bounces bums from the Go-Kart Klub.

 

Strobeknackered and tipsy on plonk, Katrina

cuts a swath through jibbering wannabes.

All teeth and skin and eyes emeraldic

under discobeams, she entreats:

 

Buzzhoney, these

are not the ropes I’m fit to be tied

up behind.  Come on, baby, let me in.

 

 

(Nigel, waxing weird and prophetic, yet again.)

 

 

Splatterguster hard from northeast brings

a wicked case of the sphinctenpops: something

like seasick, only carbonated and coming

hallucinatory in swoony little adumbrations,

like polymath bumbershoots mushrooming the fog.

Ah, London!  Libidinous and rife

with letch-y repression: gawd’s gift to the tweedy set.

I am blue, I am wind-Smurfing the Thames, mad

about you still, adrift among whackjobs

bargenuzzling and barguzzling, riverpilots

barcalounging with the best of them, cargo of cocktail

peanuts and ear of swine, party to prime

ministrations performed belowdecks by hands

so skilled they can see in the dark: fleshbraille

so sweet  there’s never a need for lipreading.

Oh my love!  My theory, my brightsail madness, moon-

lit and meandering the lost long moments

between sepulchral shadows: the works and gears

of all our fears are met in thee,

rough beast surfing ever swifter toward home.

 

 

(Leon, Geezerman)

 

 

Geezerman snores, suckled and succumbed

to the solace of slumber: sleep like narcosis

like morphine-drip nuzzled from night’s sweet

left nipple.  Mama, he mumbles, then back

to snoring, while I perambulate the veranda,

twitchmad in the buggy humidity, looking for clues;

my own escape hatch from this corpulent torpor.

Goddamn! Geezerman was the shit before the outbreak,

before geomorphology cramped our style,

rendered him narcoleptic, oracular, swamp-

funk prone and given to talking about the future

like it was the past.

 

Spake Geezerman:

 

In Chattahoochie spinster sisters evangelize

a rapid return to a time of hoopskirts

and highwaymen, hippieslut meltdown

a-comin’, Lawd: apocalypse of tits and ass,

freefall into freelove, freepill popped

to postpone Planet Parenthood. Housecall

abortions on the Q-T, done by docs on the dole,

well the spinsters, they say nossir!

 

Spake Geezerman:

 

The president coddles fraudsters

in the Lincolnroom, fondles mobsters

romanced into Supreme Courtship:

liplock magicians making money

run uphill and it ain’t no trickle, neither.

Gullywhomp, gusher, geyser: Old

Faithful spewing from poorman pockets.

O Wallstrut they their happy suck,

and the desiccated, we dance dryleaflike

down dead mainstreet, we

blow away.

 

 

(DJ Doc Holiday)

 

 

Wigged in Pharmatopia, Kat cuts a rug, a line, a fine,

fine figure: hipster citizen of a grave new world,

national anthem a groove-pulsado: techno,

trance, trip-hop: dubstomped geezerman snippetpoem

hung holographic between notes bent

to bamboozle, beatbox bandwagon drughung out

in open air.

 

Good evening children!  DJ Doc Holiday says school’s

out, but class, my babies…class is now in session!

 

(And every pupil

 

 

 

 

…is dilated.)

 

 

 

(Kat)

 

 

There is more to me than meets the eye,

though what meets the eye is mostly more

than men can handle. That broad at home?

Can’t hold a candle.      I am

not…wasted…so much as waiting

for the other Manolo to drop, the jump

to hyperspace, the place

these thumps and notes and voices are dying

to take me—these chemicals—the place

where the catwalk ends and all my dreams

with open arms are waiting.

There is a thickening in the continuum here,

an eddy in spacetime: sound and fury,

a quickening, somehow, a life

lurching like Frankenstein: electric/eclectic,

and this time maybe the mob

is on the monster’s side.  Meantime, baby,

it’s pulse and groove, throb and move

to beats primeval.  I lick the heart of the beast.

I beat my breast.  I raise my eyes to the lights

and am consumed.

 

 

(Leon, Geezerman)

 

 

Geezerman wakes and commences to speechify:

Dronevoice like dirge—drudge, diver drowning

in static—shaky connection to mists

and ethers; skipping-stone slung from mindpond’s

shore in a storm of darker reckonings.

 

I tune in, hip at last to the language of sinking,

transcribe mumbled missives, epistles

to the aphasians, internal monologues

from mountaintop guru to sage on the floor

of the sea.

 

Geezerspeak: gibberish cut with Hosanna:

high-level confab with honchos at the lab

where all our lost tomorrows are made: tech-

talk in a tongue that only The Geez can translate.

 

 

Spake Geezerman:

 

 

Hipstermags, gonzo on the latest headdress, holler,

‘THE END IS NIGH,’ though God, well God

‘s got nothing to do with it.                  More jojoba

than Jehova, her hair bathed in a bevy

of botanicals, boilerplate for swift seduction. 

 

Boy, she can feel your erection. 

 

 

Siren bestrobed and sinner besotted, she sways

all silken, swaddled and stirred into a stew of song

and stance. 

 

Strange, her circumstance.

 

Hot she wakes from trance into trance:

a dance a choir a burning bush. 

Golden calves and warheads sold on the sly. 

 

Sweetsmoke like incense from fires unseen—but fire

feeds fast from pyre to pyre—and distances, my dear,

can be deceiving.

 

 

 

Act Two—This New, Bright Apocalypse

 

…put the needle on the record when the drumbeat goes

like this.—M.A.R.S., Pump up the Volume

 

 

(Nigel explains his theory, an extension of theories of infinitely-divisible time and space, only freakier.)

 

 

Imagine, if you will, a deck of cards

—infinitely large, infinite

in number—shuffled endlessly

in the infinitely massive, immaculately

manicured hands of the tuxedoed

and elaborately coifed dealer whose

nametag translates, roughly, as “God.”

 

Let’s call her Diane.

 

Eon upon eon and in perfect rhythm

does Diane shuffle.  Behold: the coffee

spoons of your days!  The milliseconds,

millimetres hum by: space-time spun,

forward and out, from Big Bang

to Big Oil and beyond, toward heat death

and the final card’s wan and echoing

snap, then darkness forever and ever,

amen.

 

Aye, but here’s the rub: between each card

conspiring to shuffle you off this mortal coil

 

(to sleep, perchance to dream, ho-ho)

 

and card that comes next, is…infinite space!

And in that space?  Another card,

then another still—time and space divided,

subdivided, minced, chopped and pureed,

yet multiplied infinitely—each sliver

 

 

of a second, each tidbit of an inch parsed

ever tinier,  sliced ad infinitum into the  shadowy

smallness beyond our foggiest imaginings.

 

But imagine we must: each card

on end, each a hurdle in an endless flight

of hurdles stretched between you

and the place you are trying to run to.

Or steppingstones, if you like your glass

half-full and your metaphors mixed

like margaritas…BUT,

 

(…I can hear you asking,)

 

if infinite hurdles and infinite bloody stones

lie before me, how in Diane’s unholy name

will I ever get to the where and when

in which my beloved lies waiting…AND…have

I not been getting to where,

and—fuck-all!—WHEN I’ve been going, my

whole life up ‘til now? 

 

Well of course you have!  And no, you haven’t.

Our eternal house of cards, it turns out,

is a lot Oakland, like a gunslinger’s heart:

there’s no there there, because

 

(dodgy bit, this)

 

if infinite cards keep Jack-in-

the-Boxing into the air between you

and your wherewhen, there must be

a corresponding acceleration in space-time,

 

 

 

which leaves you tippy-toeing ever faster

o’er the stones that hopscotch time’s

whooshing whatchamacallit toward the boudoir

in which your little cherry tart lies dreaming.

 

And thus do you toil: cosmic track star sprinting

Sisyphean toward the place

at which you will never arrive,

it only seeming as if you have ever been

anywhere at all!

 

And only because our senses are flummoxed

by this cosmological casino game,

do we believe our toes to be tap-tap-tapping

sweet terra firma in the first place, and blessedly

so, lest we all be rendered quite mad, ha-ha.

 

Hypermodicumism!  Infinitely divided time

and space, shuffled by Diane, and moving

ever and infinitely faster, creating an illusion

of reality our myopic senses happily call home.

 

Freaky, innit?

 

And what, pray tell, are you to do with this wee

assault upon your worldview?

Why, nothing…except…think of the spaces

between cards as the plot where a new kind

of garden might sprout; ancient alley with a new

way out; new end to the old world ordure!  So,

 

Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, Jack get your arse

up off the stick.

 

 

And harken to the hum that drubs you befuddled,

wide-eyed in the wee hours: cicada-rasp

of card against card, last best gasp of another dying

star, first fat whiff of a world breathing into bloom.

   

 

(DJ Doc Holiday hints at his plan [something to do with a song that will set the listener free, a sort of communal, sonic acid] and explains the incident that set the plan in motion.)

 

 

So behold, my babies: the world rocks its tune!

Serenades down the tides from the moon,

croons the doo-wop grooving deep

in its molten middle.

 

Dig Earth’s well-beaten bongo, echoed quick

in every hummingbird heart,

the dart of every fish, the kiss

at the end of the viper’s strike,

melody mapped onto DNA by the mommy

who made us, each and every.

 

But we’ve stopped listening to mama,

haven’t we my darlings?  In our dash

for the cash, we’ve dabbled too long

in deafness—la, la, habitual ritual

—until we forgot how to listen at all.

And isn’t it getting a little loud, a little bit

hot in here?

 

Listen a moment and smell the fear.

 

Like bats, we’re blind when we can’t hear:

both lords in their castles and we in the mines,

tone-deaf monkeys dressed to the nines,

a million years from home and dancing.

My babies, it’s time to get wise.  There’s a Doctor

in the house, and he has a little surprise

in his bag might help with your hearing.

 

 

I used to ride the monsters, my babies,

bomb the blue bejeezus on a big-wave gun,

amped on a dram of adrenaline.  I was a spook

in the machine, riding down a dream in a pipe

that proceeded to smoke me.

 

I was fly, still I fell off the wall, took a  tumble

where logic tears apart at the seams:

submarine dreams, mainlined rip:

former fish on a trip between hammer and anvil,

water and rock.  A hard place, babies,

for a mammal, and you can bet

that mama had her offspring’s undivided attention.

 

So she sang me a lullaby, a lament:

said she’s collecting the rent on a cardhouse

fast collapsing into rubble, and when

I finally savvied, finally saw, she bobbed

me like a bubble to the surface of the sea.

And when the seal-pups barked,

when the gulls cried out in the saltsweet air,

I found I  spoke their tongue.

If you listen to our music, my babies—if you

hear—when you awaken from your slumbers

that rosebush bursting from your chest

will be you.

 

 

(Leon, Geezerman)

 

 

Geezerman, he weaves his non-sequiturs gnomic,

crayolas random breezes, plucks

a treebranch pizzicato, fucks with the staccato

of woodpeckers in the pines.

Buckled by bewilderment, flustered

by his flags whispered on wind—tattered,

but dense—I grab a bright blue thread for balance,

and find it making sense!

 

Every surface shines from his ecstatic waxes,

new lingos step from the closet,

slip their electric tongues into my ear,

queer the status quo with a quiet

that has mad music in its middle.

The Geez, he poleaxes polemics, muddies

the puddle, invites the Narcissists to drown.

 

Spake Geezerman:

 

Cling-rock keeps whirling through starry black,

demonstrating itself to itself, needing us not.

 

It would call us cancer, kill us if it could.

 

Bereft of the gods we’ve slain, we offer

ourselves as slaves

 

to our pain, the look-at-me lepers, the narcissists

drowning in our own puke, but never dying.

 

(Try to answer your reflection without lying.)

  

 

Wallstrut they still their happy suck,

chant their unholy hosannas, zombie

it up aloft, stogies torched with presidents

stolen and dead, grinding red embers 

into the sockets of the somnolent, Twitter-

fed and dreaming of jungles burning.

 

In hell, only the blind can see in the dark,

mad enough to bark, yet calling the world

insane. Last gaspy, it’s oxygen they crave,

a mask—a masque: let’s have a ball,

a final play with all the marbles on the line.

 

Overtime, and In the beginning is the Word. 

Into the valley of the shadow stumble The Six:

posse of this new, bright apocalypse, saddled-

up and champing at the bit. 

 

Venir, mis compadres, let’s ride!

 

 

Act three—Hackmageddon

 

This ain’t no party, this ain’t no disco,

                                                this ain’t no fooling around.—Talking Heads, Life

                                                During Wartime

 

 

 

(Buzz puts the finishing touches on the most massive, most complicated computer hack in history, while addressing the world’s kings of finance, of whom he is about to make paupers.  The one percent have pissed off the wrong guy.)

 

 

They talk real pretty, don’t they?

Visions of sugarplums and Armageddon,

of dancing through doom and coming out

covered in fairy-dust and rosebuds and shit,

and maybe they’re right, maybe we’ll party

everyone off to bed, maybe they’ll wake

to unicorns and rainbows made of

organic orgasms: no more drone-strikes,

Michael Bolton records or petrochemical

sludge: Ben and fucking Jerry’s for everyone.

 

Hooray.

 

Yeah, maybe this shit’s for real, this hyper-

modicumism, this original song, this voice

of the planet on the lips of the fishes,

in the rasp of some has-been bard.

I’ve got no idea; ain’t listened to the mix,

drunk the sparkly purple Kool-Ade.  No happy-

juice for me—not yet—I need my rage.

I’ve got a job to do.  It’s dirty and it’s delicate

and I ain’t here to be Mr. Nice Guy.

So open wide, shitbags, ‘cuz Buzz here

is going to skull-fuck you blind.

I’m going to hack you back to the Stone Age,

then deliver Doc’s magic bullet

straight to the brainpan, the bleeding heart

of every good person on Earth, and laugh

while I watch the bad boys burn.

 

 

If this is chess, I’m so many moves ahead

I’m not even on the same board.

Beware, bitches: I’m beyond comprehension;

beyond Anonymous. I’m the ghost

that haunts your broadband ‘til you think

you’ve lost your mind.  Cyber cipher

with the cosmic Kick Me sign.  I’m the whisper

in your ear when you thought

you were all alone.  And all your billions?

They’ve just gone up in smoke.

 

Consider yourselves the butt of the joke.

Consider yourselves occupied.

And consider the coming storm:

I’m as real as the wind, but try and grab me,

I whistle through your fingers like a song.

I’m a tornado, motherfuckers, and I am

more than just invisible.  One last keystroke,

and  I simply.

 

Don’t.

 

Exist.

 

(Kat)

 

 

Buzzhoney, take a chill-pill, a deep breath,

a little time-out from your Buzzy buzzkill

 

and dance with me.  An Eden breathes inside

you, baby: blood and bone and sinew;

 

symphony, striptease and ode.  The leopard

that lopes beneath your skin looks out

 

from your eyes: curious kitty seeking to change

some spots, disconnect some dots, kill the killjoy

 

who makes weapons of his zeros and ones.  Take

my buzz and make it the bee in your bonnet;

 

hack into my motherboard like a sonnet,

singe me into the hearts of the thirsty throng.

 

In your bones grows the song that remembers

the world how to sing, dismembers the thing

 

that chews away our souls.  Oh, remind us, Buzz,

that we are Mother-born, tillers of the nightsoil

 

we are composed of, distillers of the stuff of dreams.

Baby, you are more than you seem!

 

Yes, you seek and destroy; you are the plunder-drug;

cure for the cancer that eats ‘til it ends the world.

 

 

But you are the pilot who flies the flowerbomb, too,

happy answer to the Enola Gay gravity

 

that tethers us to our darkest dreams.

Look around you, leopard!  Learn to love the purr

 

as much as the pounce.  Love by the pound and hate

by the ounce.  And when you’ve kicked some ass

 

and taken names

 

…stop,

 

and cock an ear.   ‘Cuz the band will be playing our song.

So set free the trigger that haunts your finger,

 

allow your leopard gaze to linger,

a moment upon the prize.    Eat the ecstasy in my eyes.

 

Buzzhoney?  Come dance with me.

 

 

 

 (Nigel, to rest of cast—a benediction, a pep-talk of sorts)

 

 

This is miraclemagic:  yours: cyberarrow

cupidshotstraight to pierce the unprotected middle,

the protracted muddle, halfway twixt hither

and yon—not boondoggle, but fandango; fan dance;

esoterotic harlequin hipsway—Eurotrashed

come-hither disappearance.  A dame, a duraflame

pyrotechnique; unexploded plastique;

communique and comeuppance, half-pence

and no-mas pobre in the cheeky rejoinder…huh?

 

You know, vixenvexed and staggering, muddy of boot

and none the wiser, wizened, but not aged,

pixie-dusted, pixilated and angelflecked; smittenman

burned all crispy-like from sunspot glare; her hair,

eyes and smile seeming sweet, stroked, petted…and you?

Punched daft by Judy, then cradlerocked into some

seeming submission.

 

And yet…

 

this smoldering simmers all subterranean

and feeling its way up: toward flameburst,

hot in the open air.  You vacate your resort—the

last—end of the road the line the world and left-

over from some lifetime lost, unremembering,

yet tremored true, somewhere incarnate and re:

again, not yet over, though over and over

again:  brainblown.

 

Exactly that!  And to stagger then, mindlessly—fucked,

fucked-over, fucked (alltheway) up—eyes downcast,

but updragged toward phantomburst: blast

from the past, mushroomcloudy daze, days lasting

seconds only, eons, ages—traumaed little forevers

flashed-frozen in fleeing—fleeting flareup immortalized

in a single heartbeat of the gleam generation.

 

 

 

 

(DJ Doc Holiday, as he and Buzz prepare to go all Robin Hood on an epic scale: both global economic revolution and apocalyptic dance party)

 

 

And thus, my babies, this piece for four hands.

They quiver above turntables; hover

over keyboards; one pair shaking, the other

…stone.  A Pied Piper prepares to strike

up the tune.  A fist unclenches, alights a lamp,

jimmies loose the long-lost last wishes.

We’ll play Ali Baba to the forty thousand thieves.

We will bring the booty back home.

 

From our Trojan steed we will breeze

our banners into prayer, flag the bombast

that trumpets down the walls, make music

in the halls where history’s bloody echo

will cease to ring.  Narcissus, take a long,

last look, because it’s time to dream

with the fishes.  The wishes of the many

no longer dance to the tune of the few!

 

Hey kids, shake it loose together;

the spotlight’s hitting something

that is bound to change the weather. 

O poet, free the fatted calf tonight

and stick around!  Limber your lyric,

lithe and making a million kinds of love,

mad to music that tremors on tip

of tongue, teeters the topmost rung

of the upper palate, shoots

from your ladder with an adrenaline

that licks like flame, fame’s fine fifteen

felt by every pipefitter, each teacher

alchemizing naptime and rhyme.

The times, they are a-changing. We are

rearranging the pages on which history is written,

fucking with the happily hypnagogic,

their flea-bitten logic, the tricked-out,

trickle-down-upon, undammed.

Undamned, my babies, come surf this torrent,

tango to tone-poems drummed with a breakneck

beat.

 

A few last keystrokes, then a dervish

delivered to every device: everybody, world-wide,

webbed into a net with no spider at its center:

trampoline, not trap, and all of us, we trip

to whatever groove illuminates;

illusions flown the coop; no longer dupes:

no delusion, diatribe nor opiate for masses.

Heads no longer installed up asses.

We pretzel the ostrich yoga no more.

 

So headphones, maestro, and shoot to thrill!

Still the clock that tocks us to the brink,

and drop the bomb that will boom our Garden

bright.  It’s a Buzz-man’s holiday, my babies,

so tap, tap, and now it’s on: ballistic, intercontinental.

I’ll drop the needle on the record,

drop the needle on the record, drop the needle

on the record when the drumbeat goes…like…

 

 

this.

 

 

Coda—the Gospel According to Leon

In the beginning was the Word….

— (John 1:1)

 

(Leon, Geezerman: Leon has stumbled onto the scoop of a lifetime.  It’s the end of the world as we know it, and he’s got an exclusive.)

 

 

So there’s the scoop, and hence begins my opus:

libretto to the opera that recomposes the world.

Crack-shot, crackpot, cast of billions:

philosopher; hacker; ethereal beauty with a memory

of Eden.  Music Man: surfer of the wave

that sails us all.  And Geezerman, he weaves

his words ‘round this tune like ivy turning Tudor

to wilderness: beats and syllables that grow

to grandeur in the chest.

 

Like treeburst, like redwood from seed that sits

in your window all winter,

pit that begets the garden that grows you wild.

You hummingbird blossoms until you’re flower-

bombed, your mind nectared to explosion: wild

with pods, petals, Telecasters and dancing shoes

with diamonds winking from their soles.  Giggles

rain down in hues so new you need shades.

And damn, don’t they look good on you, too!

 

The garden you grow in is you.

 

But everyone else is here too, and who knew

that such blooming could be contagious?

 

And how to write the story of re-beginning

the world?

 

Genesis without nemesis.

 

No snake?

 

Only the writhing that wriggles within you. 

 

And sin?

 

An incorrect answer to the body’s question. 

 

Yeah, I guess the devil is in the details,

and there’s a shitload still to do.  

 

So put pen to paper, without further ado.

 

 

(Diane, to Buzz and Kat)

 

 

So you fired the fuse that gleamed a generation

into season.  Now you name every hour

until Evensong, and Adamant, you buzz

the happy apple that feeds the hungered throng. 

 

Your sting, it shocked them into knowing, into sense.

And now back to your orchards,

having already raised some Cain, rained down

the decibels that razed the walls,

dropped the bomb that uneclipsed the world.

 

And shadow-boy, you even got the girl. 

 

Or she got you.  Real neat trick, turning one

into two, two into one, and in that one, a multitude.

 

So tonight may you sleep, sleek in a dangerous

new naked, lush in your leopardy skins.

And loveslick you’ll purr, blanketed in blossoms

under heavens dizzy with satellites.

 

When not hiding under his bed whimpering, Brent Terry writes, runs and teaches in Willimantic, CT.