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THE THEORY HEADED DRAGON
by Carol Dorf
The left head snorts then inhales
Marx and exhales Lenin,
while the right one distills
Adam Smith into Ayn Rand.

The inner music of desire
Rock and Roll soundtrack
fixed at 19

The orator announces,
“The lower organs of the party
must penetrate the more backward
regions of the proletariat.”

Stravinsky, declares printemps
Broken rhythm denoting a complexity
we played rotely in high school orchestra

The theory headed dragon
blasts between thickets of hegemony
tail thrashing blaring televisions
through rose bushes that narrow the path

Horns blare insistent blues
forcing submission
from the marching band

The dragon annoits itself with the glittering
scales of economists who won nobel prizes
for the elegant calculus that proves we’d all
be happier if the rich got richer

Pogoing to punk on the 8th floor
and the music is never loud enough
the party never large enough

Moon rises on the Dragon’s festival
Surplus armies of the unemployed
march arm in arm with the fungible
labor force, exchanging chants

The radio provides little comfort:
On one frequency a gun-loving rant
on the one above pimp-whore rap.

No one is neutral in the chamber
of the theory headed dragon.
Each book shines as elegant
as a poem beaded by tiny footnotes.

Imagine pattern: drifting into sleep
at the Philip Glass concert,
or to the insistent dance of blue grass.

At the end of the Dragon festival,
trained handlers clutching position papers
direct the iridescent heads
to blow past each other powering

A dirigible. It rises, painted in slogans
that vanish into a one-hundred year silence
music of the spheres fading away.


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