Poem

 

  NERO’s ORCHESTRA

 

Poem By: Dr. Billy Alsbrooks

In your lifetime, how many actual breaths of air have you inhaled without the stench of anxiety tainting them? “Shall I ever be what I am?” asked the orphan heroes of the slum world. Stumbling across fate, wrestling with the divine, I decided to leave what had been alone. I witnessed Heaven and Hell warring over Burroughs “Naked Lunch”, as Blake wrote his song. Conversation gimmicks that manipulated the cloth seduced them into returning Saturday to the Lord. The blind masses, ignorant of the elite’s techniques of persuasion, have become the bull that chases the bullfighter’s cape. It’s not their eyes that will give them away, it’s the music underneath that will reveal their hidden. Who said the clock has to go in one direction only? We are all just mutations of lower consciousness, somehow thinking we are growing wiser through technology. Who removed the silence? Why must we be trapped in a prison of words that limit us? Are there not any colors on the painters pallet that would speak louder and more profound than these sloppy languages that we make love in? Order is maintained by the elite, who outlaw subversive communications that they cannot control. We must rip the facades off the establishment’s message and usurp the ridiculous mindset of the people that have allowed them to dictate terms to us. The stones that rolled back upon Mick Jagger kiss the lips of a rebel quarantined. What happened to not trusting the government and thinking for ourselves? When did the beat writers writing stop beating? When did California turn back into the police state that the flower babies once overturned? Liberals have become conservatives and conservatives liberals, both marching in the same streets yelling for revolution. The struggle never seems to elude the evils of poverty. Let us let go of the expectation, that we the people might ever have freedom without the chains that come with it. They manage and control the conversation, because we cannot keep our mouths from joining it. This authority exists only in the absence of Samo’s spirit, which used to smoke them all out with his graffiti. Their lies exposed on his subway walls painting the truth for decades to remember. Am I a Martian on earth, or a Matt Damon bound for Mars? You don’t need permission to glow in the dark, as long as you have your Covid mask on. Nero’s orchestra of blood continues to seek power, as we the gladiators die in the modern Roman belly.