Ads for ski resorts in Parnassus
Use stock photos and puffery. Tragic
Greek heroes have been reincarnated as
Tragic drag lifts. Stony Dionysus, with his hilariously
Small *****, laid down one day and died of disbelief.

With him went epiphanies. With him went the Maenads
Who once tore their own sons apart with their bare hands
In the name of the shadow of their drunken god.
Gone is the time of performing sparagmos in the open
Or brutalizing the self-righteous prophesying.
We can’t abide gleeful brutality anymore, can’t hide
Our base instincts behind self-defense, can’t claim
We hallucinated our children were lions, that’s why we dismembered them.

It’ll be reborn. All sacred ground is, eventually,
Through the eternal unimagination of our collective
Unconsciousness. We never developed anything better
Than the cycle of, “Look, the evil Titans came and and ate permanence
Then the Deus ex Machina cut their stomachs up, saved and reassembled
Our ideas personified, so that at a later date they could be
Moulded into tourist traps and eaten again.”

the squelch of the Maenads' feet

danced grass into mud.

their murderous waters breaking--

carrying Orpheus' head in their bellies.

their glazed masks of perspiration became

stuck to weedy tresses of hair--loose as the

plucked strings of Orpheus' lyre.

their droplets of sweat premixed with blood.

Dionysus obliterating memories of irreversible

inebriation between his teeth--grape clusters

downing his chin like a handfed babe.

Orpheus' harmonic Sparagmos--where the

eidolon of every G*d reverberates an uppermost

image.

as Orpheus' head meandered, crashed & tumbled

thru the River Hebros--his lyre stayed by this throat.

playing dismemberment.

the goat song of tragedy.

undercurrents of Hades saturating Hebros with the

narrowest name of water--leading out to...