twenty-four

Once I had a live album by a band called Firehouse.
Perhaps you do not remember Firehouse.
Who does? Anyhow,

this thing showed up in the mail.
From the sound of things, the singer from Firehouse
was quite happy to be in Japan.

"Hello, Osaka!" he said to the audience.
Much of his between-song banter
worked slight variations on this theme.

In the Gnostic universe
where a just God absents himself from creation
and lets the sentient beings below have at it,

I imagine a mixup in the continuum.
Six thousand Japanese show up
for the taping of the live Drastus album.

In a severe breach of concert etiquette,
the hype music over the PA before the show
is in fact the entire Drastus catalog.

A fanfare of digital scraping heralds the arrival onstage
of our man in some sort of robe.
Cloak, maybe. You can't really tell. There's fog.

"Goodye, Osaka,"
he intones mournfully, in long syllables;
and while half the room expects him to leave,

he plays his set,
and then everyone knows
what he meant.