He Who Would Inspire
Meaning to amuse, he laughed;
meaning to arouse, he beamed aloud.
It was as if this, his immolating self,
could bind any audience to his thrall.
It was not the same, though,
as that for which he aspired,
what he had to do, to experience: that thing
which he knew he had the capacity to create.
But it was never enough, never enough, to sate the need,
the hunger; to not merely pluck that instrument’s strings,
to make of these combinations and permutations such sounds
that the songs they formed would inevitably please,
but would have them awaken, inexplicably startled,
even alarmed, as if by some alien sun at dawn,
its retinal reactivating effects,
energetically calling out, shouting, to every receptive corner of the brain,
and would see them fly, as if an in-drawn breath alone
would raise them, annihilate the gravitational pull of earth,
and they would float, bubbles, rainbow-hued, angelic,
right up, right up, to each-other’s fantasy of sky.