Posts Tagged Mahler
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.
.
Perhaps, It Should Be Bach
Mahler adds a false drama to my winter afternoon.
I’m the bear who’s been torn to bits by the shotgun,
but I’m not. I’m the silent mouse, daintily crawling,
searching for approval, strangled by all of the thorns
of ice falling with aggression from the moldy brick
buildings. The scampering of the Mahler violins
makes me jump on top of the stale structures, and
the horns, the most powerful horns with the trombones,
they urge me to tear into the buildings with giant claws
made from plastic straws which never transport
the vanilla shake that helps fix my terrible moods,
but the buildings smash back at me at impossible
diagonal angles, shrinking me, forcing me to realize
who or what it is that I am. The man in the cafeteria
Speaks on the phone as if with his lover, and he’s
terribly ugly, but he creates life worth living, while I
pull the shards of ice out of my body, while Mahler’s lush,
glazed violins sing of unspeakably beautiful children, and
just before the children die, hope bubbles in my silent zones,
Trashed again by a man who is really a mouse, a parasite.
.
Searching With Repeating Synergies
Posted by Carl in Essays, Finding Purpose, Music on December 29, 2010
I listen to my favorite music over and over and over again. If I stand back to observe my listening patterns, I might determine that I am grotesquely obsessed and perhaps insane.
This observance has occurred repeatedly over my entire life, but yesterday morning I was a particularly harsh critic. In the car CD player (it’s an old-fashioned one that only holds one disc, which perhaps points to a laziness as explanation for what is to be described) was the Nine Black Alps CD. I saw these guys with my friend TK. TK goes to a bazillion rock and pop concerts and once in a while I tag along. We saw them in a bar for a $10 show with maybe 50 people in the crowd. They played all of the music from the CD much faster so the entire show was one big adrenaline rush. They were incredibly talented and mechanically perfect, or tight as we like to say. Afterwards, we met them and bought a CD for $7. I’ll never forget how wasted those guys were. This was after I had quit drinking so I was punch-hyped on Diet Coke, but man oh man, those guys were wasted, and I remember wondering Read the rest of this entry »
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