Please listen. Down-bow (still) into rest.
Remove your mask and let lids deter
mine your shade of hues,
Then – remain there, forget that comfort
Existed. You’re no longer alive.
You’re a dead lesbian-musician-poet.
Now that you’re dead,
Afford yourself a grin now and when,
And then applaud the person you’ve been
Became, up-bow with acceptance toward now
Watching resin shuffle-dust-twist inside the hair
On the gentle wood that allows you to play it
With such harshness and violence
Stop expecting answers from imaginings
To be alive in a hallow moment and land
The pause
Has truth cleared the fog?
Embrace it like a living-dead friend
Not everything bends into a corner
So, arc the cusp of the straight crow flying
Leaving yester for before: to turn
Wisdom into virtue, let the lot be wonder
Forgive the coiled insides of the pieces
That have done you wrong – lend each note a breath
Exclude the redness of fingertips to umber
Off a climactic cliff (Shostakovich perhaps)
Then, awe-gaze with sleepish toes that count
And enter only through “stage door exit” – exhaling (still)
Listen to the drone…
Tend to the shiver-ice trills, but let the air in
Release the flight to take its course
Arriving whence-where you landed (still)
In womb
Root your soul there (with the audience’s permission)
Then drive, an invisible melody addicted to the void,
Notice the curled up lips that float upward, without bow-tilt
Naturally upright, hovering-rod-folks with their
Odor, far beyond organic, they are
Petals plucked by the clichéd breeze
Of tonal tranquility
Or do they fall, and disappear?
Do they understand what you’re saying?
Now the coda,
Then stare them down, convinced you’re standing
Look out the window, stage left, the outside collapses
Arteries collapse on top, you feel like you’re climbing
Which stiffens gaze and agapes the jaw
Emptiness eclipses your shadow
A pinhole in a silhouetted membrane
Dispersing some self before your past cries out
Gasping for sustainable matter – blackness
Of notes, of suffering, of shoes and their scuff-marks
On the stage, life’s stage
Which is not your world,
Which is, you realize
(entirely) (still) absolutely hollow.
Thoughts?
Comments
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I detect the professionals rubbing off on you- especially those disjointed wraparounds right in the middle of a prepositional phrase, which I perceive as intended to self-define our era, for I see no other purpose for them, they are absolutely jarring...! I've seen that parenthesis use before, but I've never understood it, other than a frivilous style thing. I suspect the method you used was stream of consciousness with back-editing for impressive verbiage and image enhancement... (I do it for spelling and clarity!) I see a collection of image fragments, so the value of this piece lies with the reader (and especially the listener) coming away with a single clinging image fragment or two... and it is a 'feeling' piece, so maybe leaving with a certain feeling, also... (and heaven forbid if you did not have the reader in mind at all, and were merely displaying writing skills to impress the professionals! There are medieval punishments for that...) I could not make out the intended mental voice, other than a kind of whisper (there is an entire set of poets whose sole output is whispering on this site)... I do have a suggestion, but I don't know if it's in vogue with the professionals- I'd add a little to the visual/sonic aspect with what I've defined as "alliterative/consonant/assonant beautification"- the balancing of key letters in near-lines, not necessarily just in-line; doing so also bends existing images and creates unexpected new ones, since you're selecting new words... I use the tool for 'beauty' pieces, but I keep an eye out for unwanted nuance changes...
Since the piece is very abstract in its entirety, it will be hard for most readers to grasp the piece as a whole, or any of the images the words are forming, for they are all unusual, which is good for an exercise in originality, but too many will muddle things... such pieces require dissection, the question is, will it reap benefits for the reader once an understanding is achieved? For I find that even the most cleverly written piece may still be mired in undeveloped social/psychological thinking and cliche topics/viewpoints/scenes/feelings, which are not worth the effort on the reader's part to unraveling it (or, in AP's case, read it twice); kind of like the kid who waited months for his Ovaltine decoder, expecting a profound message to be discovered, only to find the message says, "Drink more Ovaltine" So he sits there dejected, thinking, "All that effort for THIS?" (a true story) So if you write abstract, make sure it is worth decoding...
You should post some of your music, I've written many, many pieces to a variety of it, and vice versa... now I'm off to see if the Quartet is on Youtube... (and I've no doubt they're there...!)
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I am reading it over and over again (instead of writing). It is fascinating, one hell of a way to use language to express music. I think you're a genius and I love you.
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