Posts Tagged Beethoven
Strung Up
Motor-mouth machine, what part
of me believes, hopes for happiness
or peace? From mean to easy, neither
works, for punk am I, from the long, wavy
chords in Beethoven’s Number Two, his
weakest, but so powerful, stretching to dive
into a bar of the music and live there,
hide there, never come back, but I am being
a restless dog, first shaking, moving almost
a century to Mahler Number Tnree, and it’s
here that self-pity reigns and crashes in on the
senses, the false triumphs, dogging my ugly
lack of talent, forcing me back to now
where nothing can be good, not even
my favorite music. I whisper desires to drop
dead and slink away as odorless gas, with
or without music. Mahler, buddy, I am
gone and can’t come back. Scream, Mahler!
Against the Minuses
This is my poem for Day 5 of the PAD 2013 challenge. I’m having fun writing more than I have been and forcing my editor to sit on the back bench instead of guarding the front gate.
.
The work was a drag, but the music,
a plus. Tornadoes of gossip, wiped
by Mahler or the trinkly angels
of Beethoven’s Seventh. The edits,
the critics, but cubicle walls, a plus.
Crystal, a plus, she floated through
the hallways, another angel, dainty
with perfect shapes and glorious smiles
with reddish hair. The windows exposed
dystopian architecture, but the angles,
a plus, forging desperate thinking, clever
gimmicks. The carpet, not so staid,
with patterns of light dark medium dark
light, a plus, and, the biggest plus, three
four five four three, ending with two threes;
and march to fives, a plus when permeated
with a need to meditate, need to soften the blows
of the day, the battering of pride, which perhaps
should be gone, where we keep our heads down
so we don’t know about being disregarded,
and that’s a plus.
.
City People Left Me Here
They block one lane,
but there’s no traffic.
No pedestrians today.
We’re all under blankets,
though weather is quite mild.
The hiss is from man’s machine,
not a good addition to Beethoven’s 7th,
but I eventually block it out
as I do the rest of the happenings,
but the smoke from the machine scares me.
Morning Today, Back to Beethoven
In my crib,
staring at impossible geometries
of a soundboard, now silenced.
The stern, unloving expression
of Mother, her piano dead now,
she, plastered in a wall,
but she is the one,
she gave me Beethoven.
Her concrete face,
the dilapidated memorial,
and the honey and syrup
of the soundboard wood.
She had Beethoven,
giant in her tiny shoulders,
making bigger sound
than you’ll know,
the warmest, entrancing sound.
The unthinkable
inevitability of rhythm,
harmony and tone
smash me brilliant,
terrified orange,
in my crib,
and when in my crib,
the universe is perfection
right in front of me,
right on top of me,
while I struggle
and yearn to reach the hose-blown joy
with a mouth, wide open
in violent surprise,
as joy rockets out of me
in blasts from a furnace
boiling my blood
and the leopard jumps from the roof,
eating the postman for an afternoon snack.
All that I can see,
small world from my crib,
are the fullest waves from my boiler
of bliss, melting the soundboard.
And of course, the glorious horns
of the Seventh, smashing all
of the deceptively-hidden, the bad,
and I am a blistered, babbling balloon
with millions of batons shooting
from tiny pricks in my baby skin
Oh, but my, how I shake,
uncontrollable, unspeakable,
outrageous joy at the perfection
from a man who knew a god,
who knew the most powerful god
man has ever known,
a man who gave me a god,
who showed me god in a
Turkish march,
and I feel the furious happiness
blow out and around me
as I bounce in my crib,
and I think,
“Man, this is good.”
Beethoven, but a temporary impostor,
full of magnificent joy,
and that will be gone soon,
too soon; I’ll be dying,
dying from my diseases again, soon,
but for this moment,
in this genteel, decorative,
flourishing white crib,
“God, this is good.”
Opus 57
Born
down,
roughed up.
Enchanting
stories of music
penetrating deepest cracks of
holes in self made from Beethoven’s most ugly temper
simmering in baby blue bed.
Mother tears apart
confidence.
Drowning.
Red
seas.
The Death of Dreams
Not old but old enough to be dead.
People visit merely to see if I’m dead.
Watching a car wreck not long before the wreck.
Avery Fisher Hall, bigger than all of earth’s atmosphere,
With Ode to Joy blasting away at the darkness of space,
All so tan and so wood-bound, like being within a still heart.
Give me that black block and put me on top and enjoy me.
Allow me to stomp, stomp heavily and wave gloriously.
stillfugue 