You are dropping, the pre-beat skitter of sensation
Making you weightless.
The anticipation crests, dips, hints at
Its own resolution, rhythm insinuating itself
Until it thuds through you.
And you realise: you knew it all along.
You’ve heard it before, know where the
Hiss like a gentle ripple of feather against the
Inner skin of your forearms starts,
Each separate drum pattern like a different
Fingertip tapping, insistent,
Shimmering in your nerve endings.
This next bit drifts, earthily ethereal,
And you don’t care that this makes
Precisely zero sense to anyone else
It’s your track, your experience,
Your associations, the thud
Underpinning the drift
This music hails you,
Reins you in and sets you free,
Fleet, repetitive, wordless,
And everything you need it to be,
Summoning forests and starscapes and
Those times you danced until 6am.
It, too, bids you farewell, blended into the next
By a master whose choices speak the language
Of Everything In Its Right Place,
Fingers crooked to beckon a deeper layer:
The book you haven’t finished writing yet,
Pages of historical imagery glittering between these notes.
It blocked out sound when you couldn’t make your own;
Wordless, it was the voice of controlled insanity,
The hallucination pinned in pages
And pages, and pages of people you’ll never meet
More real than anyone you ever will, sometimes,
Heroes and bullies and victims and saviours, some of them the same.
The darker layers ground you in the nighttime scrambles
The gambles with gravity made by people
You can never hope to be, given life by your keyboard;
And surely they’re bored, waiting for you to
Tell them what’s next, stop them from endlessly
Teetering on the precipice of the call to descent.
While you eddy in self-recrimination,
The music swirls to an end, no resolution met
Except the resolution to resolve.
Your foot describes revolutions beneath your desk,
Pent in the need for tactility other this virtual frisson;
The lesson still eludes you, like the almost-words you hear.
Kyrie Eleison? Is that it? Or something less sacred,
More profound, grounding the liminal in the reminder
That humans colluded in this acoustic miracle where you
Sough across the cosmos, in tune and out of sync
With your inspiration, metamorphosing the metaphysical
Into the metatextual, with a staggering lack of shame.
And maybe that’s all that’s needed: a sharing,
And you’re getting good at sharing without touching, aren’t you,
Breathing separate air and yet resonating across the distances.
As Above, So Below, you learned that theory far too long ago,
Feeling the void at your core thrum, somehow,
In recognition of the thing the music sings about.
The emptiness shouts in layers, the kind of colourful
You only find in camouflage, and still the tunes press on,
Unstoppable as guilt; as loud as your sleepless companions:
A formless sense of failure, and the fear of being found a fake.
Never tell me all artists feel the same way –
They’re delusional in their inadequacies, I am not.
And now even the intimacy made by the use of second person
Is broken; as inconsistent, in the end, as the internal rhymes,
The six-line stanzas, the clattering stabs at insight.
And it feels like cheating to end this on a neat highlight,
Next best thing to happy ending,
When the best you can hope for, playlist on loop
Is to hold out for your favourite track coming back again,
Fast-forwarding where it’s needlessly uncomfortable,
And binge on comfort, purge the words,
Binge on comfort, purge the words,
Binge on comfort, purge the words, hope the scourge
Of self flagellation cleanses wounds that can start to mend.
And if not? You can always press play again,
Submerge.
Fade to rainbows.
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| This image was the first thing that turned up on the image search list when using the search term “Glittering Void”. It’s apparently a still from this completely soundless video. |
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