Gavotte with the Gods: Be wary of your wishes (reposted from Facebook)
My apologies for having just entered something like twelve ReverbNation contests in a row, thus ensuring a barrage of notifications in the twittersphere and FacebookWorld. As I mentioned earlier, I'll be devoting today to highlighting the new tracks on my new EP. Having taken care of tracks 1 & 2 -- the two new versions of "The Trick" -- I now move on to track three. This song is entitled "Gavotte With the Gods/Be Wary of Your Wishes." The music is adapted from one of Manuel Maria Ponce's gavottes. The song is more or less a cautionary tale of how wishes come true, but rarely in the manner we expect, and that there are always consequences. In terms of subject matter, you will find a number of parallels to "Children Will Listen," from Stephen Sondheim's INTO THE WOODS. You will also find numerous references to tales from Greek mythology, in which the amoral nature of the gods is essentially used to demonstrate the cruelty of fate and the far-reaching consequences of our thoughts and actions. The song also helps to frame the remaining tracks on the EP, some of which delve into mythology (Greek, Chinese) and others into history (Holocaust), often tinged with irony and sorrow.
GAVOTTE WITH THE GODS/BE WARY OF YOUR WISHES
Be wary of your wishes: They come true
Be mindful of matters; they’ll come back to you.
Ouroboros on your wrist. Every king’s a slave.
With eternity’s reign inside an earthen grave.
For every wish that’s granted there’s a curse unleashed.
The fatalistic boilerplate of oracles and priests
That masquerades as blessing but that rots the core
Of the outward vestal virgin as it does the whore.
The gods must surely laugh when they process prayers,
Poring over fine print for loopholes and errors.
Sadistic little bureaucrats with axes to grind
Every wish you make, you must pay mind.
The life that has no end has no end to pain,
But a race that’s run and ended can’t be run again.
And so each grant of immortality comes with cost
Something dearly human dearly lost.
Eos begged of Zeus an endless life
For Tithonus, her love, to be his wife.
But eternal youth she did not specify.
Tithonus ages but he never dies.
The flush of Helen’s cheek turned Paris’s head.
See his brother Hector lying dead
Outside the Trojan walls, dragged behind Achilles’ wheels.
But death, too, soon comes nipping at Achilles’ heels.
We grab for power. We grasp at fame.
We want the world to know our names.
We follow folly. We fare as fools.
We tangle in lines Fate’s spun from her spools.
We mortgage our mortal souls against odds
leveraged against us by the gods,
Played out like pawns on a board past our scope,
Trading our happiness for hope.
The fruit of out reach, the well that runs dry,
The rock we roll up the hill to see slide by,
The gift of sight that all the world doubts,
The hubristic act that turns the crushing wheel about.
Bride to a god entrapped by a seed,
Punished for naiveté and human need.
Beauty despoiled by covetous age,
The trade off for your spot on history’s page.
Be wary of your wishes: They come true
Be mindful of matters; they’ll come back to you.
Ouroboros on your wrist. Every king’s a slave.
With eternity’s reign inside an earthen grave.
The anagram of time finds you on all fours
Entering and existing through life’s two doors,
A moment standing upright in between
And soon enough you’re crawling, wondering where you’ve been.
For every wish that’s granted there’s a curse unleashed.
The fatalistic boilerplate of oracles and priests
That masquerades as blessing but that rots the core
Of the outward vestal virgin as it does the whore.