There’s art to everything we do, but is there enough
Freedom to let us pursue it? The physician
Takes off his shirt, waves his recorder
And descends to a limbo before exhorting
The crowd: “We want our freedom now.”
The drum circle has absorbed it all, relentless
At the business of metamorphosis. Even a whistle
Can’t keep the flow from veering around
Its steady downward course of river, where the ocean
Rolls into the drums.
Some would call it chaos,
The way the dancers erupt
When timbales and tabla explode,
And the silver bass drum from the high school band
Has gone off the grid, to the conscience in the wind,
Where weed spreads
In the brush fire of riotous hair,
And a tenor waves free jazz
Over the proceedings, straight to the belly dancing hole,
Which finds its own place too in a conversation
Tuned to music, that won’t hold back the truth.
They are this close to walking away from the duties
They are told to do, from professing any faith in a rule
That denies the divine
Order that emerges of the bougarabou.
“Toto, we’re not in Saigon anymore,” they would say
If there was any freedom to do so. “There’s no
Fluegelhorns, the great fondue scare is over.
The nuns skate the war of the cherries on ice
And Calista’s glass jaw has made an impossible comeback,
Stuffed inside Hack’s giant duffel.”
