An idea that I hope might go viral

After adding music to a read-aloud I recorded, I was pondering about how I might post the mp3 I created.  I got an inspiration.  I’m sure the band is always getting people to “give them ideas” – gag  me with a spoon – but I was thinking about a new way they might grow their business – adding music to read-alouds, like what I had done … except, without violating any copyright laws, because the band and I might make a 50-50 agreement on copyrights before going forward with the project.

Just as I included a music track to my read-aloud of a children’s book, I was wondering if they might add a music track to a poem that I had written, hoping the song might go viral and make us all rich!

August 30, 2010

Dreams were made of nights like these:

Stale tobacco blowing in the breeze;

Beer spills left from the night before;

Giggling faces flowing out the door,

Cigarettes, whiskey, and wild crazy women

Through the purple haze ever dancing and singing,

Singing “sex, and drugs, and rock and roll",

They kept on dancing so they’d never grow old.

They were dancing shadows against the wall:

Dark shadows in a flashing hall

Where crimson and horizon blue

Pressed against a starker view.

They were pulsing beats that shook the floor
And rattled the windows evermore;
The ceiling ached from their refrain
Shrieking echoes of a primal brain.


They were disembodied troglodytes,

Walking fish, stromatolites,

Carbonated fire and ice

Permutated from the roll of the dice.

Whole cities burned in flames like these.

Cold ashes long scattered in the breeze.

© Daniel Kurland, August 30, 2010

Note:  there are numerous literary and other allusions in this poem.  Here are a few: “blowing in the breeze” – a reference to the epigram of T. S. Eliot's Waste Land, written in Latin about the Cumaean Sybil, who was writing all the knowledge of the world on leaves, preparing to bind it up in a book, when the door opened and all the knowledge of the world blew out the door; “purple haze” – duh, Jimmy Hendrix; "sex and drugs and rock and roll" refers to the unfortunate battle cry of my generation, the Baby Boomers; "dancing shadows" refers to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave; "evermore" refers to the Raven, by Edgar Allen Poe; "whole cities have burned in flames like these" refers to the fall of the Trojan Empire -- my son and I recently watched Brad Pitt's portrayal of Achilles, and it was amazing when my son snuggled up to me with his old Greek mythology book, totally unexpectedly.  My vision is to add layers of music and commentary to expand the context of what children are reading, which might add value to their experience if they were using some kind of audio-enhanced e-reader … obviously this poem wouldn’t be appropriate for children, but it might appeal to an adult listening audience and go viral!