Appoggiatura

I wrote the first sentence about a month ago, while sitting in the car at the beach. Finally got around to finishing it. Hmm...I'm moderately pleased. At least I finally found a use for my immense musical vocabulary.



Writing -
not a creation
but a translation.
Emotions made tangible -- legitimized.
Music manipulated into syllables; staff and key signatures
stretched in line breaks and semicolons; melodies thrumming
like fingers on a typewriter: 16th note runs, breath ^, marks,
and tri-pl-et quarters.


Whisper sharps and flats [accidentals] like poetic-license; throw pens down
in anger and slash out entire phrases: repeat(s). Return to the beginning and twist
the laws, because limitations were made to be tested.
Speak l e g a t o s
and staccatos through double-reed lips [slender, smooth sentences curling around
mouthpieces, churning beneath your fingers, convoluting and spiraling into fragments.
Choppy bits of fever.]
The spaces between ledger lines are all that's needed to
fill the silence between enharmonic screams;
a sigh of air; a rich naissance of sound [oaken]:
bass clef, bold; baritone, bisbigliando.


As a writer,
you are a mere support; a composer.
In essence [at heart] a rhythmic bass-line
tying the music together, omniscient, overseeing:
10 measures and the sounds take over - take flight -
take their own road, and all that's left to do is keep up.
You are an appoggiatura:
a flick of the fingers, an eighth-note abbreviated;
graceful, then gone.
But your writing is a symphony;
a sonata, lulling late at night;
sometimes just a melodic line [2 measures, 8 notes]
that makes me shiver like all those tremolos dotting my waist.


Part your aperture lips against mine;
Bb fingers brushing my cheek: two-fingered caesura.
Take me to the Coda and let's diminish to a niente.
Make me forget I'm out of tune.