Collab Poem (in progress)

This is a collaborative poem project set up by my sister. It features seven or eight different writers, and so in effect many different voices within the same setting. The bold+italicized writing is mine.
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I

An apartheid pallor sizzles. Walls on either side,
Brimming in the sweat of Agamemnon.
Where is Oresteia? Entre les rues,
Les journaux of eddying lizards, the posters flame,
Bleaching satyrs of their colors.

Descant of the watery sunrise,
Like the swelling of the Parthenon. Families “surface”
With what they have rid themselves of: their militant heresies
Westward plunging to an increate Thames. Now and then,

Their dotted remnants drift into conflagration,
Major-minor themes, or dialectic written and directed
By David Mamet. Punked-out in a billion flourishes,
Their voices tremble with the genius of their gearing slaves,
A geometry of theater submerged by Pentecostal fire.

II


Smelling salts do nothing for the members of this theatrical performance,
the fire, merely stage dressing.
These creatures of habit see and hear only the lines and the lights,
blind to society.
Blind to Aphrodite.
Coexisting with static characters, value none.

These Athenians smile only at Dionysus.
With cup in hand they cheer at the fictional scene before them,
ignoring the growing fire.
Believing that Hephestas is merely assisting the performance.
Sealing their fates as only the aristocracy can.

And down on the base of the mountain, among the sheep and blood soaked cottages,
the brazen citizens laugh at it all.
Velleity in their eyes as the hierarchy burns to ashes.

III

In Andorra my whole heart burned during dijous gras,
beating with the cool, white blood of night. This was childhood,
always blooming. I slept with my windows open and believed
in God.

We grow older and things change. In Tsiknopempti we
had to leave everything.
This was nothing like childhood,
not the puckered meat of a warm dead body,
the burning wine and lambs in red tavernas.

There was only fire now, the great sorrow of
all things finally breathing in,
glimpsing their memories
through fire and falling to dust.

A woman named Aegea hunched over
me in my sleep at the feet of Poseidon,

where is the water, where is the water?

Clean Monday is coming but everyone is dead,
riding pale foxes toward the sun. In the morning
Aegea will help me smell the skin of my Mother.

IV

One thousand years from now
above the Aegean Sea,
two metal beasts collide,
raining flesh and flames,
the scorch of burning skin.

Ashes of past beauty carpet the globe.
An age of punditry rages.
Safety is gone, its illusion revealed.

A voice commands turn back,
feel fully the space between once and someday.
Theseus's sword saved him from the queen of poisons.
Could we ever be so blessed?

V

For blessings indeed are entombed in doom.
Accounting for loss is a paper task, and
counting the gain is a look back through ash
or forward into partitions of possibility.

Consider the giddy spine of delight
that rises in a ridge along the shell of
horror we wear in fearful times. Consider
the thrill of every scorched breath

drawn in the company of those that breathe
no more. List now those values burnt, but
feel the future freed of the weight and echo of
the crumbling, logos-silenced Parthenon.

VI

The Parthenon is in want of a new pantheon,
The statues are gone, let us scatter marble
Like crumbs and try to spread the seed
For temples to bloom in new Cimmerian lands,
Athens, Rome, Alexandria, Constantinople,
This list of resurrections is a great one,
But we have too many millions to fit inside
One agora, one amphitheater, or even the Piraeus,
I fear too much or too little resuscitation,
Much is still covered in ashes and refuses
To be the ground for new legends to grow in,
Pericles dies in Dallas from a stranger’s gun,
Socrates has his liver pecked out in the East Village,
Homer’s son goes mad in a Tuscan prison
And grows sane in a sanctuary by the capitol,
While Euripides dies at his Hollywood typewriter,
Even Alexander finds little hope for change
In the mountains by the Khyber Pass,
Babylon burns, good enough, yet Persepolis
Threatens ever again, Ahura Mazda and Zeus
Still battle for the crescent with their minions,
Bright Apollo’s light and lyre reach the few
As ancient frenzies attendant to Dionysus
Mix inside the painted porch with the Eumenides,
Oh terrible repetitions, we have only taken
The torchlit forms from history’s cave wall
And ruled here with homemade shadow puppets,
Plato, will the fate of one who has seen this,
Alerted the others, and met with disdain,
Reenact the end of your allegory with real blood?
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More to come in the near future.