Rage of Troubadors

In the days of the Lion Richard, of tournaments,
And honor, in the days of faith and innocence,
Troubadors, those minstrels with the velvet voices
Would roam through the realm cloaked in silken raiment.
In the pastoral splendor of Antiquity
They could touch the hearts of their listeners
With wands of song charged with melodious magic.
They'd weave their reveries into a tapestry
Of wonderous images and romantic rhapsody
That would leave their audiences rapt with emotion.

Chivalry and romance have hardened to asphalt and steel;
Savage, soulless structures that house their inmates
In the bleak grey harshness of urban despair.
We need Revolutionaries now, not sonnets.
We need poets who mirror the rebelliousness of our age.
They ravage their voices with shouts of angry defiance
Punctuated with chords of electric violence.
They claw at their instruments with a frenzied passion,
As though raw brutality could wrest wisdom from them
And translate it into waves of charged pandemonium.

Those screams that you hear are the rage of troubadors
Doomed to live in their grey hell of concrete and steel.