Tambourine Men

This poem is based on “Fire and Ice” by Robert Frost. When I read “Fire and Ice” I thought of it as kind of a poem about the destruction of a utopia, how they utopia dies and for what reasons. So I wrote a poem about a collapsing utopia and its inability to see what is really important. Kind of like the humanity in “Fire and Ice”

Tambourine Men

Hey,

The clanging man swishes

Through the abandoned Ballroom

Full of thesauri and Sugar Mountains

And latex-headed strangers who can’t tap

Dance

The stiff-toed folk look silly

In the Vietnamese arbor and

They swat each other with

Racquet Ball Racquets

And one

Poor clown-boy achieves a

Sweet black eye.

So now you can’t see, clown boy.

And your not tired, clown boy.

And the night-lights are gone

And the goblins and the disgusting

Tumoral

God- Dogs

Are lost in their God-

Dog fantasies. Soaked

In rust water and corn.

The whole field has been attacked by aliens

And goat-footed “philosopher-kings”

—Can’t learn

To play the piccolo.

All games are lost in the rotting

Gingko branches. The chauvinist villages

Are thick in the bleeding lip.

In the jungle

The

Lion

Has learned to feed on

The children’s skin. And

All is an awkward, bluish silence now.

“We’re done.”

And the villagers pull off their horned-

Rimmed glasses and think of longs lists of words

They had memorized in the thesauri:

dacnomania

fagin

macon

radappertization

waldflute.

And the horned-rimmed adult-parents

Learn that none of these words will

Rescue their forsaken children the excitable children.

All lost now.

Gone is their wall ball. Gone is their

Somalian Piracies