Steel drums beat symbiotic rhythms in the night,
crashing together metal and flesh with each organic auditory announcement.
Tribal percussion rings out fast and free
signifying the footsteps of dance,
spoken with toes and heels,
arms waved high to spin hurricanes;
here comes the story of the whistling gale.
Bodies bend to sound, ears tuned to the stars,
every breath becomes soul, every soul becomes ours.
Muscles heave limbs to the wind, like sails to catch notes,
like nets to reel in the utterance of throats,
fingers trace the form of every sound as it slips
from ancient scriptures and lips,
to taste the songs that birthed the world through fertile hips.
The infancy of fluidity recalled in the curving, coiling viridian vines of our DNA,
deoxyribonucleic acid tabs to illuminate the darkness between each
rhythmic pounding of our hearts,
as we keep natural time
to unnatural beats:
mechanical, synthesized rock breaking rock to peal away thunder and rain.
Raindrops are the protodrumsticks, hammering itinerant beats upon animal skin,
the membrane we still dwell within,
each tumultuous torrent of water splashing life to life in the rock pools of our ocean.
This rolling tide provides the melody,
springing voices effervescently,
out of silver-blue waves to chase each empty cave along the coastline of our psyche,
to wash away silence and replace it with reverberating resonance,
calculating the reverence of prayer out loud.
Vocal cords cut loose to speak gibberish in praise of the divinity of understanding,
hands link arms like daisy chains
and each person becomes a being of the sun,
full of light and sound,
blazing bright music to wash purple scented leaves into trees
that we may write our lyrics upon.
Fusion of genres is the path to us,
singing wildly with our feet we tap-dance our messages in Morse-code to the soil,
and the world rumbles back that we are welcome.
We all waltz around and around,
just as day follows night so step follows step,
and we orbit the jukebox of eternal jazz,
blues,
rock,
gospel,
and soul,
listening for metal,
punk,
hip hop,
and violins out of control.
We are every hollow drum compelling air to vibrate,
and spirit to vacate
the receptors of reverb crossing paths with celestial fates.
Strings plucked by Greek hands jerk marionettes into
Broadway roulettes as green-fingered executives
lay waste to the crescent of emergence.
We sang our harmony above black seas,
arid sands and olive trees.
Drunk on euphoric Euphrates
we danced,
before towers and avarice,
before languages broke us.
Prismatic pyramids present the perfect approach to attain the sky,
reaching high to slide our fingers tenderly around the sun.
Ra sings sweet,
and Horus, anagram of hours, homonym of ours,
the son shared by Isis, giver of gifts and eternal mother,
grants us open eyes to drink in the music of light
that drips, cascading down from above,
painting murals on the canvas of the night.
We sing to the tune of these beads of sunlight,
bodies of starlight
condensed into one.
The scorching heat burns our skin with fragrant ashes of hydrogen.
As each illuminated note casts triangular shadows against the desert,
we skip back to the plains and lakes that birthed us.
Each voice touching the air like an elegant opus,
trading lyrics and words for mantras of birds
in flight.
But we are no longer here, and this is no longer us,
and having deciphered the hieroglyphs of the stars,
we believe we understand the language of the universe.
So we throw out old records, play our reason and logic on infinite repeat,
presenting our manipulated choreography to a manipulated beat.