The Mutant Shrine

An attempt to describe a punkish attitude. Despite what it sounds like, I did not intend "fire that burns coldly in hard veins" to refer to heroin or any drug. I was trying to contrast the celebratory and worshipful inebriation of ancient bacchanals with a quite different kind of modern worship. (We'll leave the whole somewhat related "Dionysus and the Maenads who tear him to pieces" thing aside.)

I regret not working harder with the cadences and rhythms within the lines of the poem. Pity. However I adore the last two lines and they way they distill (sorry) what I was getting at. They aren't perfect but I like them. Note my affected and conscious use of the spelling of "compleatly." Funny, huh? Even funnier is the anachronistic use of hogsheads to describe where the bacchanals got their wine. In Greece during that time, I believe they would have used amphorae to store wine. Let's just chalk it up to artistic license rather than ignorance, OK? "Dammit, Jim! I'm a poet, not a historian!"


The Mutant Shrine

The youth eternally within drunken awareness,
happily singing with the grape vines
Growing in abundance and hogsheads that never
entirely empty, never compleatly drain.

In the hills of Naxos, Bacchus reveled
with the ardent followers of his creed,
Celebrating fervently the coming of the full moon,
toasting happily with worldly certainty.

In the streets and alleys of the city, young
bacchanals perform different rites;
Death in their eyes, they imbibe not of wine
but of fire that burns coldly in hard veins.

No laughter echoes in the darkness of the alley
encasing the votaries who have forgotten
The name of their deity, and they hiss loudly
in the silence surrounding them.

They chant: All the gods are mutants,
deviants howling and hawking their wares;
We are the defiant and the hating,
and our love can kill the gods.

March, 1979

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