Ungu Malungu, the King of Ace

Today’s poem is about Don Drummond and his ill-fated lover Margarita Mahfood.
song lyrics HERE

Part I:   Lyric Line of Flight

Lebanese soul keening in the sea breeze of Jamaican dusk / falling into Caribbean depths from Levantine heights / Jah dawta danced her way from Lemuria to Penchuria / transported to the border from the country of madness / her steps sliding in the trombone’s skanking plaint /  Queen Mother of Eden, world’s first woman / calls from island foliage to her King of Ace / singing from the interstices of his rib / where Eve turns Abel in Canaanite love / the notes of her melody slightly off / like country-style horns / dissonance sharply arresting / was he Adam or Lucifer to her ? / why did he enter her garden ? / no trace left of Margarita / just one pearl of pulsating thunder / love lost in the bloodshot eyes of her musical murderer / play on

Part  II:  Poem

Margarita in Limbo 

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon lover!
Coleridge, Kubla Khan

Rolling in calmly, herald of thunder
the border crossed—and then the madness reigns.
Subliminal rip-tides drag us under
while the Arawak arrow-poison drains.

Your Penchurian passport stamped: Anita . . .
we follow your voice to Eden in memory.
Pearl of great price in limbo—Margarita
you sing us a paradise purely sensory.

Xaymaca met Lebanon on your isle
in Nature’s temple of living pillars.
The trombone slid as you flashed a smile,
turning rude boys into Rasta killers.

You sang of a forest where word is thought
where love flows free in harmony’s vein . . .
in death your fame arrived unsought;
a three-minute heroine you remain—

but those three minutes liberate time,
set free the thunders of our soul
explode the colors of a tropic clime
where musical rhythm paints the whole.

The skank turns into something different;
volatile, combusting like flaming rum.
The island downpours’ dark effluent
washes your wound. Selassie soon come . . .

Mahfood in Limbo 1

Behold— We Come

And the Spirit and the bride say, Come.
And let him that heareth say, Come.
And let him that is athirst come.
And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely.
Revelation 22:17  (KJV)

Some speak of evolution from primeval protoplasm . . .

I swim against such currents and proclaim the true Creator.

Yet, like they do, I also find release in that hot spasm

and wonder why God gives the overwhelming indicator.

The Good, the Beautiful, the Damned; the whole human race has’em;

Dutiful prudes, psychos, saints, the intrepid masturbator.

All move together toward that annihilating phantasm:

the tissue-sneeze of discharge has to come sooner or later.

He could have ordained spores instead of sexual contractions . . .

but we are born of bliss (Edenic failures notwithstanding).

Though humankind delight in such involuntary actions,

the ends to such exciting means surpass our modern branding.

Fallen minds misunderstand, and think that God hates all pleasure—

yet it was He who gave to us this strange pulsating treasure.

Herculean Memories: Superinduced Hyperbole

 The golden age of poetry finds its materials in the age of iron. This age begins when poetry begins to be retrospective; when something like a more extended system of civil polity is established; when personal strength and courage avail less to the aggrandizing of their possessor and to the making and marring of kings and kingdoms, and are checked by organized bodies, social institutions, and hereditary successions. Men also live more in the light of truth and within the interchange of observation; and thus perceive that the agency of gods and genii is not so frequent among themselves as, to judge from the songs and legends of the past time, it was among their ancestors. From these two circumstances, really diminished personal power, and apparently diminished familiarity with gods and genii, they very easily and naturally deduce two conclusions: 1st, That men are degenerated, and 2nd, That they are less in favour with the gods. The people of the petty states and colonies, which have now acquired stability and form, which owed their origin and first prosperity to the talents and courage of a single chief, magnify their founder through the mists of distance and tradition, and perceive him achieving wonders with a god or goddess always at his elbow. They find his name and his exploits thus magnified and accompanied in their traditionary songs, which are their only memorials. All that is said of him is in this character. There is nothing to contradict it. The man and his exploits and his tutelary deities are mixed and blended in one invariable association. The marvellous too is very much like a snowball: it grows as it rolls downward, till the little nucleus of truth which began its descent from the summit is hidden in the accumulation of superinduced hyperbole.

The Four Ages of Poetry by  Thomas Love Peacock [1820]

Vaginalia

 

Here, the bifurcated portal
gateway of expanding life
smiles rebirth—transcends the Mortal
splits the double “you” of wife.

Hail the great democratizer;
let us all salute the Queen—
Mankind’s rosy equalizer:
She Whose Splendor Reigns Unseen.

Treasure trove of procreation,
tunnel of love and fleshly muse,
membrane of illumination,
countryside’s exciting views…

Organ played to heights celestial,
bio-rhapsody exposed
proving that our best is bestial
and our earthly home foreclosed:

Grant us now behold thy beauty,
worship at thy humid throne.
Let mankind discharge his duty
in thy sacred pleasure-zone.

Though Somali blades despise you,
though your maidenhood offends,
Egypt’s night will not disguise you
nor separate you from your friends.

Vaginalia

Image adapted from The Vagina: A Literary and Cultural History by E. Rees