PAD Day 5: Orchestrated Chaos

 Once again, Write Better Poetry is very late with their prompt, so I am going just with NaPoWriMo's prompt for now. It invites us to choose from a menu of words and phrases: one item from the first column, which is a list of amusing directions inspired by the Italian musical directions on sheet music (e.g. allegro non troppo), for example, "literally go nuts" and "improvisatory screaming." (I actually incorporated both those phrases into my piece.) The second column contains styles and types of music, from which we should also choose one. (I chose "symphony.") And the last column is a word bank of twenty-one words from which we could select one or more to use in the poem. (I picked nine: sharks, nonsense, bones, concrete, pool, chain, vampire, butterflies, moonlight.) So here is my prose poem, (if I can be allowed to call it that) a political satire on how our current regime may "conduct" an orchestral symphony:

Orchestrated Chaos

 
Last night, as a celebration of "Liberation Day" at the Kennedy Center, the National Dementia Orchestra conducted by Benito Furioso premiered a new work by Russian composer Serge Putinski: Symphony #13 in A minor, “Non Compos Mentis.” The first movement opened with a clarinet solo which sounded akin to a mouse in a blender. This was followed by the strings introducing the main theme—or as well as they could, as they were using chicken bones instead of bows. The brass then took up the theme, though it was hard to hear them with their bells full of Jell-O. The rest of the movement could only be described as incoherent noise. The second movement opened with a lovely scene—the release of several boxes of butterflies from the stage, but they were quickly sprayed with insecticide by the first flute. The pianist unexpectedly began the opening strains of the Moonlight Sonata before being escorted off the stage by concertmaster and first violin Josef Gumballs. Maestro Furioso then bought the ensemble to a deafening crescendo, and the entire orchestra literally went nuts. Gumballs, dressed inexplicably in a vampire costume, wielded a chain saw and cut his instrument in half. The percussion section attacked each other with mallets, the tympanist flipped over his kettles, a cymbal flew across the stage like a Frisbee, nearly decapitating the harpist, and the oboist jumped into a pool of sharks. The cellists smashed their instruments on the concrete floor, thus ending the movement. By this time almost half the audience had left, not due to the nonsense on stage, but because they were led out in handcuffs by security guards for having the wrong tickets. The third movement was played by a reduced ensemble, after Gumballs laid off the entire viola section, the trombones, half the violins, and all the percussion. It reached a quick crescendo, however, when a chorus brought on stage for this movement began some improvisatory screaming, mainly because the disgruntled percussionists had brought in an electric vehicle and set it on fire. Mercifully, the concert ended before the final movement could be performed, not only because the concert hall burned to the ground, but also because the orchestra had suddenly cut off their own Federal funding.
 
[Note: This will be my last column for this publication, as I have been detained for writing negative reviews.]

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P.S. Write Better Poetry's prompt finally came up: Write a poem with the title "After _____." Since I already like my title of the the poem I wrote and didn't want it to begin with "After," I wrote another short one:

After All

After all that’s said and done,
There can’t be less that’s done than said.
No just battle can be won
Unless we act and forge ahead.