Original Rock

An ebony lament once heard
‘cross southern fields, marshes and groves,
Many a lonely heart it hurt
Just a touch, but to heal the soul;
And when heard ‘round the day
This cry, this mockingbird
flatly tuned and hard-lucked,
The sky no longer shone azure,
But eight darker hues,
They call ‘em the blues.

Melancholy chants so soulful
As to perfuse the stringed lady
With amaranthine gloom,
And impregnate her in summer,
These titans to beget
Not Zeus, but something Dionysian
A brash enfant terrible,
Fiercely young, crass and defiant,
Peter Pan with a bad do,
Rather peeved by the Man too.

No more the aching everyman,
No more hollerin’ pain away,
No more subdued notions
Of explosive emotions that
Shake up a beastlier within,
Which moans, shakes for raucous
Escape from the noxious tedium
That modern living comes not
without. Cries of juvenal birds,
Reptilian, primordial, in titillating thirds.

With sounds like reefs, in jagged
windswept keys and drenched
By beating waves of intoxication,
The sonic force of a boulder
Rolling down a canyon
Wrecking trodden roads.
Dorian Gray reworking,
All wrinkles and wear marks,
Unafraid of the matured art,
That swoons a renegade heart.