Osirian Rhapsody: A Myth

for Larry Neal and Bob Marley

I

He said he was seeking the wind,
the summits
of its
birth: those legendary heights
composed of ice and snowdrift,
blue rocks of morning,
tantamount
to time's crystal beginnings,
beyond the syllables
of endeavor: visions rooted in
forever, wafted in the silence of our dreams.

He was a tall, hawkish man,
aquiline-eyed, rangy,
filled with
strange longings,
silent passion
danced in his voice--a poet,
some say--his angular figure draped
around
a battered guitar, whose
melancholy soul conjured
moments of unspoken intimacy,
filaments of desire
washing like tides across memory's shores.

We sought him, sang by his side, those
opulent
midnights when,
caught in the music's enchantment,
expanded our vision:
seeking the sonorous
cataclysm
of bardic rapture manifest
in charismatic overtones:
weaving textures, tonalities,
tattered dramas of our heartbroken destinies.

II

We were the New Men:
magic singers
riding soaring carpets tot he stars.
Galaxies
of creative ecstasy
spread out before us,
while we chanted litanies of Rebirth,
bound (we thought)
to upset holocausts
this repressive, hidebound
earth had manifested,
creating tombs, jails,
infernos of the spirit,
exterminating
angels of the mind.

He was our sage, our
blue-voiced
genius-child: prophet of
galactic metaphor,
magus of angelic vistas
of sunburst,
elevating legacies of dawn.

He said he was seeking the wind,
that roaring
genie/conjurer
of monsoon velocities
in unsung archipelagos,
tropic vistas where
the emerald sacredness
of vegetal beginnings
erupted in the womb of myth.

In ostrich-plumped epochs
of Nubian splendor,
he sought the scarifications
of secret wisdom
etched upon
the indigo flesh of kings.
Oracle
in escalating decalogues
of melody,
he rummaged through
the runes of harmony, to discover
the silver scales and ranges
of
syncopation
released from Pyramids
of monumental
Joy.

Invocation/Chant:
Hawkman of audacious rhapsody, bearing
a new sun
cradled in the Whirlwind's voluptuous
laughter,
obsidian sacrament to
archetypal passion evolving in
primordial darkness,
we chant: elaborate phallic megaliths
elevating
electronic polyphony to languish
in the melody of your
breath.
Osiris of cyclical
Avatars: aboriginal pungent
sepulcher baptized in
totems of ancestral
blood,
We Oracles caress
tendrils of
elongated
crocodile fire
to fertilize the obeah
of your Song!