Quest,
The band,
Whose egos were too huge to co-exist
They didn't try, and agreed to cynically vie
To make each new song worst than the last,
And succeeded magnificently;
The band who wore boas, pink silk and mustaches,
Betty Davis hair,
And preened like California surf studs,
Never whining of their renown,
For they clothed in high school sentiments the subversions of high school poets,
Discovering and proclaiming loudly
That "love" means death
And "dreams" mean life itself,
As every prom band from Brownsville to Sault Saint Marie
Will agree, as long as the songs, in any key, can be
Bombastically stirring, beautifully pretentious;
The band that in a million posters summed us up:
The singing hair stylist, the gas station guitarist,
The house painter bass player, the disturbed church organist and
Fight manager drummer,
They toured towns in every exurb of Savage Plenty,
Holding businessmen hostage in elevators,
Moving cars, producing children
Who were born to seek this secret, for twenty-one futile years
Of radios too embarrassed to remember
Until the times, ever cruel, forgot,
And the wardrobe of the hip ones became the uncool threads of their parents,
And the birthsong plays again as if for the first time,
And decades dissolve into a stone that gracelessly holds the center.
We cannot escape, we who fled this madness years ago,
It comes back in all its lazy mendacity,
The symbol for what really is,
Not some Greek aspiration we call Art,
Just five guys powered by jellybeans in a studio for five hours
Producing sounds that still keep the Tsitsele crazy
Stamping and chanting its yeah yeah's for weeks.
