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It first dawned on my awareness like a false dawn,
but as I drew closer, I couldn't be deceived:
the infectious sunshine - chung-dip-chung -
of that music, fully risen on the park horizon.
Though an older man now, and conscious of it,
I couldn't help but quicken my step, and young men
commenced to overtake me - this group of five with five
cigarettes between them, moving dance consciously.
They were out of sight when I reached the hill
from where you could see what the ear described
as a railroad experience: the sound was the art
of a rolling steam engine - unseen; the sight
was different: skinny arms in marine buoyancy
waved in ecstasy of knowing all these things.
Should I stop here, I reflected, it would sum up
for me adequately the whole event.
But I was driven to enhance the experience, closer
to the mass behind some trampolining youngsters,
what looked like they were juggling to the same beat;
beyond where the culture folk were beached in colony.
Soon, I had descended, and the stalls opened
to my approaching stride, the expected display
of things that were stuff the music backed volumes
to: carpets, trinkets, candles - all handwritten prices -
boasting internet links, some stalls did - oh yes,
and CD's in their psychedelic covers,
a gravy of patterns in which images floated
and toppled in plastic squares off a glacier.
I was moving across the space, my feet unerring,
like I was meant to be there, though I felt out of place;
and I came to a stop just short of the stage area
where the lead singer was making his earnest poetry:
how much like me, I mused, though he would laugh
at the notion, but I admired his expression
through the fantastic vocalising and the rhythmic
effects of a ceaseless body motion that controlled
his waving assembly, as they danced their delight
with his enthusiasm, counting it honesty, and that's
what thrilled, the truth of it, and the freedom
thereof, as it scaled the heights of lager licence
in the dance! - I couldn't help but smile, though
frozen, and sympathise, and feel the wrong-doer
not doing their truth, I could not, and so I left,
a transgressor, and was thrust into contemplation:
the thought was fundamental - it had to be,
to fault this honest ecstasy: was this the heaven
and the substitute for holiness to which we all
are called? I could see that all this joy was based
on the retention in the mind of a world around
that was, in the knowing and hating of it, really there
to stay: and the only argument to work against it
would be to match the reality of it: in a myth.
A myth constructed from the music and the dance,
and humans are just born that way, only ever
will they change: it is about the fantasy of truth
and love, and what the singer called "being one, one day."
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