The Day The Music Died

Hold the stick

The rhythm seems smooth with delicate, cautious tempo

But metronomes change too suddenly

Then delay the drumroll

While notes remain splattered on this concert hall's ceiling

Waiting for the final autograph score

Before I let my hands follow the poor director's lead

He should know that the music in me 

is gone

and dead

crushed to a pulp and powdered into dust

like a Monarch's touched wings

at the final clause of winter...

no more song, mister. And I do regret.

The first yellow days put across lovely visions

Such cream-filled, storybook dreams 

Of a grand symphony composed by Consonance

Held together with harmonies so finely tuned...

And I was eager to play

Intent on hearing sounds of my own shaping

Avid on giving away a little more each time

Missing a little more melody

every pitch took me higher, into greater realms of 

dismissed exertion

aborted fancies

the usual...

and clearly

hearts burned on too short of a wick.

Only a few more ways to give

To replay that "ditty of bliss"

Except the same old frenzied arrangement

Crawls from parchment to printed copy paper

Da capo, with a bit more bended tessitura

And careful counts into the next measure...

My dear amanuensis,

I could stake your life on the leger lines

above and below the pretended pitch

I would bet that you run during seconds uncounted

crying in the winds of color that rush past your face

the volume rising from serenely soft

to absurd, fortissimo howling

shocking depths of unlocked tenderness

caesura, caesura

we don't count time while in love

take your breath mark while I live still strumming

and take it slow

none can steal this tempo from my pulsing veins

caesura

caesura

we don't count time while in love.

Little by Belittle

I cannot undertake this tidal wave of your teasing...

In and out again, I am washed up with just enough breath

To carry my soul through to the next round.

Grains of sand make their way to my throat

Burning like an acid sample

While the distant lighthouse sends out its searchlight

For my broken bones over the shores.

What am I? Some nail to please your Carpenter's tricks?

Beat me and beat me until I've given in to the hammer's head...

Still I think you should know that I tend to (t)rust

At the most inconvenient times.

I suggest that you spare your perfectly crafted tools 

For I cannot live up to these labors of love

And maintain any remaining shards of nerve.

I Am: Part II

I am 

An artist with words

A Draftsman of disembodied thought

Davinci with a new set of oils

(Curious to where Real begins before it ends...)

Rembrandt in the renovated man's era

A Picasso mocking color in theory

Coarsely worn bristles are my lyrics

So delicately laid upon this canvas of cloth

(One that I tend to call Apathy)

They give texture to ordinary streaks

Though none of us "poets" see ordinarily

For our eyes are shut tight by the adhesive of ashes

We breathe in pastels of the most intoxicating nature

I am 

Susceptible to the wills of an amateur's desires

I can play like Daguerre with camera obscura

Capturing still, black-white frames

Of Deadness

Frailty

Renewal--

charred feathers floating pitifully 

through the tunnels of dusk

graceless and stiff

over Intuition's bloodied trenches.