Certainly, the trick in transposition on alto sax, or improvision,
even flat-out difficulty, is remembering relationships,
for sharp-minded people even struggle to remember:
a minor third inversion is relative on its own scale –
Bedeviled
I read a book on spiritual discipline
sitting in the cigar store
but I didn’t inhale.
Going home the pleasing aroma
was a whiff of tomorrow’s day-old
sacrificial stench. I showered,
practiced a song about
relationships that need to end,
proud of hitting the right strings,
How Soon the Sound
How soon the sound turns to gibberish, the
way form follows meaning into blind alleys. Listen:
I just got through playing Bach suites on
the wrong instrument for them, the wrong way,
most likely, but as it was it was meaningful,
as it was.
Written in response to a dVerse prompt: write a quadrille, using the word sound.
Ulysses S. Grant
I rise only to say that I do not intend to say anything.
– Ulysses S. Grant
I wrote as I did
in a spare craftsman style
knowing men died
the entire time I wrote
the entire time they read.
A man could be shot
while hacking though
the thicket of words
created by some generals
and die before he could act.
Knowing, then,
I wrote to dying men
and sometimes sent my dispatches
back to the living world
I demanded clarity of myself.
140 leaves 137
140 leaves 137 A space is a line feed is a period and any of them could leave you with no time to say, or time to say too much. To go back
— Poetry Tech (@poetrytech) January 10, 2014
A response to a dVerse Prompt. Go make your own!
Conductors and Composers
My worst experience had to be in high school playing Duke of Earl on the flute at football games, I’ll never get those precious hours back. Why do conductors and composers torture musicians? Were they inspired to become parasites and see if another family would claim them as their own?
– Anna Montgomery
We like it better when the composer is dead.
– The wag that sits third row in every second violin section in every orchestra, ever.
For A.M.
Conductors extrovert their will on the wanna-be.
Composers sit alone, some scheme in mind
some puzzle without the parts
until those pieces forge themselves on the framework
of theory problems that arose along the way.
Awakening Beauty
She woke up choking on it
the seed still stuck in her throat
hungover from drugged sleep
and a dream of seven mad kings.
An apple martini, a song beat cue,
everything leading to a man.
She found her dress on the floor
and her purse missing $20
but the keys intact.
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