DIONYSUS

For those of us who still believe in the magic of possibility.

By V.B. Price

Player, hider, healer,
god of fun, of masks and scars,

of giddy hope and idiocy
sublime,

of cruelty’s will
rending minds

blurred always
in lost forgetting,

always rendered in return
by disbelief’s remembering.

Dionysus, dear,
you’re all at once

this trapping jumble:
savage, jolly,

hopeless, lost,
lord of places that create us

like costumes, makeup
recreate us. Energy of all

transformation, guardian of
unconscious chances,

denying you feels
like trying to become you:

it jams our brains
so nothing works,

a sticky mess
of technicolor stars

that leads to grim
absurdities of death

by abstinence erupting
or indulgence

imploding on the floor.
We must find how to find You

in the long calm of ourselves
where you have chosen us

and chosen for us
the proscenium

of the muses
rising

from the neural sea.
Make-believe doesn’t need

falling down drunk-
dreaming magicians, though a few can’t hurt.

That’s not who You are.
Even in Euphoria we can

feel Your
obligation

to proportion
from time to time.

It’s all of You that matters.
Without the whole,

the wobbles are quite fatal.
Your double birth, in fact,

balances and unlocks
the box within a box

of You, the hidden all
of what You give us,

those parts of You
that invent

appearance, invent
seeming,

embody
beloved illusion,

permitting us to be
the likeness of another,

or even the likeness
of who we want to be

but are not yet.
The play’s the thing.

Readiness is all.
It’s not just masks

of make-believe You give us,
it’s masks of promise,

roles that form us,
jobs that build us,

parts to play that
make us act in ways

beyond us
when we play ourselves.

And what does this
alchemy

of becoming who we seem to be
have to do with

loosening,
with the vast, mysterious

nether facts
of image

and imagination
as world altering weathers?

Is the liquid genius
of the vine

nature’s code,
its Open Sesame

to states of mind that trick us
even with ourselves?

Apollo has the map
but You are pure

potentiality.
Without you

nothing would change,
order would prevail;

no humor, aberration,
no wisdom

from experience would undermine
the burdens of our long

rehearsed and boring dooms.
Revolution would remain

a seed suspended
in the death fraud of perfection.

Dionysus, You surprise
even puppets

so they speak their secret minds.
You give us

a way to be mad
that is usefully

sane seeming,
even, at times,

harmlessly
sound and obscure.

Your masks,
filtering

the purity
of truth without

self-consciousness,
unbridle us with health.

And when we dream
You pour Yourself

right through us
in mysteries

of meaning
distant as

pure knowing is
in minds that cannot tell

dreams from art,
art from fact,

truth from what
is always real:

that players are
who they pretend to be;

that stories are
a force

as powerful as storms;
that what we tell ourselves

can kill us or transform us
into health. It is You

who can unleash scenarios of war
and aphrodisiacs in solstice dreams.

We must believe You.
The penalties of rote

and ugly reason
for stupidities

of disbelief,
and going only

by the numbers,
force us to fall

so free,
so deep for You

we never doubt
Your trickster griefs

and foolish joys that apprehend
more than blank wisdom ever comprehends.

(Image by Derek Key)