The true Orpheotelest is a master bricoleur. Over the last couple days I have adapted material from the Zend Avesta, the Coffin Texts, the Qumran sectarians, some Tamil Śaivite hymns and this, which is based on an Anglo-Saxon prayer to the Cross (itself strongly indebted to a Wodēnic original.) I’ve also been playing around with meter, rhyme, repetition, and some rhetorical tricks with impressive Greek and Latin names which I’m not going to bother listing. If you’ve got a major in Classics, a minor in Lit Crit and a job as a barista I’m sure you spotted them. And damned if it’s not working! The ancients sure knew some shit. (Especially Onomakritos.) I just improved on the originals by making them Bacchic Orphic. All kidding aside, it’s like I’m having a dialogue with all of these great ancient artists, a dance, a choral collaboration with a host of honored deceased in praise of the Lord of Song. Io evoe! Io io Dionysos Dithyrambos! And I think it’s making me a better poet. Because you can’t just steal willy-nilly and stitch the random bits together like Victor Frankenstein on an ether binge. I mean, ok, technically you could, and that does sound pretty fucking cool actually (Note to self…) but the point is, that’s not what I’m doing on these occasions. I’m putting a lot of thought into how everything fits together, why, and what every word and line and symbol is doing in a given text, etc. A lot of the time I’ve gone over it so much, tweaking here and there again and again, rewriting lines or whole quatrains or more, inserting Bakchica that performs the same function as the replaced historiola, or riffing in a totally different direction so that only an echo, a hint of the original remains. But I wouldn’t have gotten there without those who came before, without cannibalizing the dead, which has opened a door in my writing that did not exist before. It’s magic. It’s amazing. Lolo Bromios!