When The Quartet Left

This is an epic poem I have been writing for a couple of days. Tell me what you think it's about. If you figure it all out, rest assured that you are totally awesome.

When the Quartet caught a train for the West,
The Captain, the Maverick, the Muscle, and the Specialist,
They were heroes twisting and shouting into the night,
Down a winding and treacherous road,
So that nothing was left to come undone--
And the Villagers gently wept,
As sympathy for the Devil gained.
When they set out to sea,
Towards the Eternal Fruit Fields of Ethereality,
The dark omen, the Black Bird, flew overhead,
And the Village agreed that it was dark days ahead,
With no hope of help;
The Village wanted to spend the rest of their days there,
On the beach, waiting for something to happen--
Waiting for the Quartet to return (wouldn't it be nice?),
But instead--bad vibrations all around, a bad sound.

Only three Elders of the Council remained:
The Father, the Son & King, and the Holy Ghost,
Protected by all the King's Men,
But they had long lost their voices to the Wind.
It was up to new voices, like the young Jester to come in;
Needing eleven dollar bills, and only having ten,
He came with new ideas of a new life and a new beginning,
To embrace uncertainty, frivolity--to forget structure,
Forget the Elders and the Village and the Council.
Another new voice arose, the voice of the Mercenary,
A dark, mysterious traveling man,
Wearing odd, dirty patchwork clothing,
Demonstrating strange powers over purple haze and fire,
And summoning a Castle for himself,
The Castle of Sand that stood in flaunting contradiction,
To the Village's traditional Red House;
The Jester and the Mercenary happily exclaimed
That the Quartet was dead, and it was the dawn of a new day.

Voices cried out against the Jester and in fear of the Mercenary;
The Green Society said that the Village had to be preserved,
And so the Green Society protested all day and all night,
Until one sunny afternoon,
A roving band of Barbarians swooped in from over the hills.
From far away they had traveled, coming from a land of ice and snow,
Screaming blood curdling screams,
Brandishing lethal, deadly weapons that the Village had never seen.
It was a rainy night when the invasion began,
As they pillaged and burned
The Village's Houses of the Holy,
Breaking in through the back door,
As fools in the rain were cut down mercilessly.
They left graffiti everywhere, their symbol: the Black Dog,
To always remind the Countryside of their power, their presence,
Burning the Mountain Side completely black.
It was in the Great Battle of Evermore that the entire Village fell,
As the Barbarians sang a wanton song of destruction,
Trampling everything underfoot, killing the country women.
Some Villagers, brave like Achilles, made their last stand,
Some made night-time flights away from their land,
Some just laid down to rest in their time of dying;
And down by the seaside, where the Quartet had left them all,
The Barbarians built a Stairway to Heaven to honor their gods.

It would be ten years gone before the rest of the Countryside
Heard of the barbaric destruction,
When finally two humble Folksmen
From a neighboring town cried their outrage,
A sound of silence that was louder than words;
But it would take the Man from the South With a Heart of Gold
To mend the wounds of the Village,
Sewing them together with his needle, after the damage had been done.
Peace could never be guaranteed, however, after so much loss--
With the departure of the Quartet,
The anarchy of the Jester,
The mysticism of the Mercenary,
The impotence of the Elders,
And the rage of the Barbarians,
How could the Countryside ever expect normalcy again?

It was of little shock, then,
When a flying saucer full of Secrets
Rounded the Dark Side of the Moon and approached Earth,
To meddle with the affairs of the poor Villagers;
And in a momentary lapse of reason, the Villagers let them,
Their minds' eye having been obscured by the clouds of war,
So that the Secrets, who were dressed in pink, convinced them
That they would all be happiest if they all just became animals:
Pigs, dogs, sheep, they lived in quiet tranquility, comfortably numb,
Not realizing that the Secrets were simply using this as a ruse
To eventually take over the Countryside for themselves--
To build the Machine that would destroy the blue skies,
And take over the damaged brains of the Countryside,
To build the Wall of Bricks
That would allow them to control and contain all.

The Machine and the Wall of Bricks neared completion,
And as the sun rose over the entrance to the Machine,
Hidden under the eclipsing shadow of the Wall,
A convocation of Eagles flew past the sunrise,
And the Villagers that had been turned into animals
Suddenly realized their folly, that what they had was not freedom,
But oppression of the cruelest kind.
They could not take it easy like this anymore,
Complacently throwing away wasted time,
For a simple, peaceful, easy feeling.
They had to regain the spirit of the days
When the Quartet still lived,
Before it was already gone.
They had to take it to the limit,
Live life in the fast lane,
Because in the long run, they could not be animals forever.
Inspired thus by the Eagles but powerless to do anything,
The Villagers waited patiently for the right moment,
And when a pack of Wolves wandered into the Village,
Born and bred in the wild to be wild,
The Villagers seized the opportunity;
As animals, the Villagers and the Wolves combined forces
To defeat the alien, pink-clad Secrets,
Driving them out with the aid of a Magic Carpet,
Which carried the Secrets all away and shoved them into the Doors,
The secret storage spaces hidden all around the Village;
And so the Doors spelled the end of the Secrets.

Becoming humans again, the Villagers realized all the Elders had died;
It had been many years since the Quartet had left,
So the Villagers, in a new spirit of freedom, elected themselves a Queen,
Feeling like champions of the world after surviving so many trials.
The Queen called a Festival into session,
With bicycle races and re-enactments of their recent battles,
And when the last enemy finally bit the dust on stage,
The Village came together to sing in a Bohemian Rhapsody,
Led by the Woman Who Sings The Blues;
She cried baby cried, because the Mercenary had left,
And taken away a piece of her heart
So that she would follow him to the ends of the Earth,
Like a ball to a chain--and she did.

Despite the celebrations, however,
All was not well with the Village;
Social unrest was beginning to stir,
For the Queen was ruling much too arbitrarily
With her Right-Hand Man who had the power of immortality,
And losing loyal supporters every day,
Until people in the Village began to cry out again
Against the Queen's tyranny, and her injustices.
The Villagers demanded an era of equality,
Especially a new family that had just moved in,
The four Brothers, who were humble and fun-loving,
But also stubborn and gritty in the face of the Queen
And her excesses and indulgences.
They refused to pay her taxes and play her games;
The Brothers simply stuck together,
And when the Queen threatened to banish them from the Countryside,
To force them to leave their home,
They armed themselves with pistols and stormed her Castle;
On a road to ruin they marched, with pleasant dreams in their head,
Too tough to die, the four lowly, simple Brothers
Unleashed a blitzkrieg of fury on the Queen's army,
Staging what became known as the Revolution,
Which lasted the entirety of that one battle,
Forever remembered as the Clash, the Only Battle That Mattered,
All in the name of social justice.
Unfortunately, this new state of affairs could not last,
Because the Brothers failed to cultivate the Village's culture;
Their upbringing had been too coarse and unrefined,
And they led a society that was more like living in the jungle,
Typified by the power of a gun-toting new gang called the Roses,
Who felt like they could turn the Village into their Paradise City,
In which they could satiate their appetite for destruction and debauchery.

It would be many years before an intelligent sense of aesthetics
Would return to the Village, but when it did,
It was actually brought about by a single Boy and his piano--
This Boy having waited for the longest time,
Simply keeping the faith that his vision of a River of Dreams,
A steady stream of ideas and intellect,
Would one day run through the Village again,
And squelch what he termed the Fire,
Which was the state of backward barbarianism
Established by the Roses;
He spread his message far and wide across the Countryside,
Spreading his gospel of the River of Dreams
And the squelching of the Fire,
And telling people that the only thing holding the Village back now
Was just a matter of trust,
Because he knew that they didn't start the Fire,
But they certainly could put it out.
And so people listened to the message of this Boy,
Echoed by respected Villagers like the Boss,
Who advocated a return to the glory days of the Quartet,
And finally awoke from their savage and base ways--
Traded their spears away for clothing, war face-paint for make-up.
It was hailed as the Cure,
The in-between days where art and literature flourished;
These days were just like Heaven to the artists of the Village,
The boys who cried and the girls who died;
Fascination for life was everywhere on the streets,
And so the Boy and his Cure brought on the disintegration
Of the barbaric rule of the Roses.
In the name of art and culture,
The Village flourished as the Athens of the Countryside.

However, it was not long before Athens had her Sparta;
They were a very small but aggressive and bellicose people,
Magical flying people known as the Pix,
Who did little but break bodies, dig for fires, and redden bricks with blood.
But the Pix were simply too small in physical stature
To wage a war on the Village,
So they enlisted the help of the Spirit,
A mysterious and unearthly force of nature,
Powerful and visceral, with a very distinct Smell
That could cast a spell and drain the Village of its intellectual desires.
So the Pix and the Smell of the Spirit were able to swarm the Village
And knock its pillars down,
And make its buildings crumble into rubble,
So that many parts of the Village were eventually abandoned.

As time passed, green moss grew on these ruins,
And so the Villagers would always remember those days
Of the Pix and the Spirit as the Green Days,
When the traditional color of fertility
Actually symbolized impotence and decay,
And where people from the Countryside would pass and say,
"Welcome to Paradise,"
As a joke and nothing more,
And no matter how hard the Villagers tried,
None of the moss would come clean.
And so the warm, intellectual, Athenian air was forever stung
By the blow brought on by the Pix and the Spirit,
So that all the Villagers lived their lives during the Green Days
By the motto: "Nice guys finish last."

Opposition to this mentality, however, did come,
In the form of the Blue-Pink-Green Droits,
A group of men formed in response
To the general mood of the Green Days;
The Droits tried to emphasize the other colors
That were visible in the Village,
To get the Villagers to see more than the green moss--
To see the blue sky and the pink health surrounding them as well;
The Droits urged the Villagers to recognize
That they were all still living the good life,
That they should just take control of their fates,
To not let the world just turn and leave them,
Even if it meant that they had to travel across the sea
To live on the mythological Island in the Sun,
A place known to the Villagers only in their dreams
As a world full of perfect beauty and happiness,
Where, legend has it, the Quartet sailed off to retire,
And are still there now, to this day--
The Maverick and the Specialist playing pool,
As the Captain surfs and the Muscle sleeps in the shade.

Time in the Village passed away
In this more or less mediocre age,
When the Villagers began to realize
Just how much they had been affected
By the Quartets' leaving;
The Village had never been the same since,
And had gone through incredible strife and turmoil,
So that people had now forgotten what peace, love, and happiness were.
They only knew of struggle, war, and hard times now,
Strange chance occurrences,
And the fight for power among the powerful;
These were such deep-rooted problems
That no Villager dared to even think they could be solved,
For they knew the Quartet would never return
From the Island in the Sun to save them;
So when hope did arrive on the back of the long-haired Donkey,
Not a single Villager took notice.

The Donkey strolled into the Village at midnite,
And saw it for what it was: a loser and a lost cause,
A sorry tale of a people that tossed out their Golden Age,
Left it on the side of the road
To be eaten by the Vultures;
But his robotic rider, the Android, saw things differently.
The Android and the Donkey had been traveling all day,
And they decided to spend the night in the Village.
The Android normally was quite paranoid about new places,
But tonight he was optimistic,
As he noticed that everything was in its right place:
Lying on the ground,
Where all things ultimately came from and went back to.
The Android liked this practical solution
To the problems of urban planning.
He rode the Donkey to a bar and went inside,
And sat down next to the Creep in the far corner,
An old, old man from the Village
Whom all the children were afraid of,
Who had survived everything that had ever happened
Since the fateful day of the Quartet's departure,
Everything from the screaming Barbarians
To the Roses' reign of terror;
And the Creep, slightly drunk, felt a kinship with the Android,
And related the entire story of the Village to him,
From the let downs to the lucky breaks to the surprises,
But the Android was not surprised by anything in the story;
He had lived his entire childhood in a glass house,
And had traveled all around the Universe as an adult,
And had seen all that there was to see,
From Telex planets to talking vegetables to fake plastic trees,
So that there were no more surprises for the Android in life.
The Creep couldn't believe it;
This extraordinary history,
This legendary tale of heroes and villains,
This story of fortunes gained and lost,
These heart-warming and heart-wrenching,
Exciting and infuriating events,
Was it not a compelling and dynamic epic,
Of the highs and lows and fate of the once great,
But now fallen and broken Village?
To which the Android responded simply,
"No. Whether you were fitter, happier, and more productive,
Or whether you were pigs in a cage on antibiotics,
It's all the same. Your story is not dynamic.
You have always been the Village,
The Village of the Countryside--
Even when the Quartet left--
And so you shall always be the Village,
Regardless of what happens in your history,
Good or bad.

And it is OK and will always be OK
If the Quartet caught a train for the West,
Because the Village they built, I know now for sure,
Will always remain, always survive."

And to this the Creep wept tears of honey.