Sam Silva
Prelude To An Oriental Caesar
True to Russian form
Stravinsky with his existential genius
...his brilliantly choreographed strands of atonal
musical tissue
...threw a pagan relic
at his poshly decadent Orthodox Christian audience
...unlike Molotov enjoying a cocktail
all that they could muster back
was a rotten tomato or two
about the time of Europe's imperial peek
when the gods of War came together in friendship
and celebrated such wealth
by butchering young men and boys
with machine guns
where in a slightly earlier age
they were sent down holes
to extract minerals
for the gods of money
for factories
of tin
and beef!
In the New portion
of the white World
Hollywood
gave up a coarser art
celebrating such things
as love
and racism
...and quite soon thereafter assembly lines
of machine driven cars all painted black
and boxed formulaic
redirected the machinery
of a Midwestern city
where non human mules
became obsolete
till fascism gave way to hamburgers
in that kind of unrestricted gluttony
which may now
by all accounts
cause the planet to warm
and suffocate.
Sam Silva © 2019