Singing Beyond Penance
The vocal chords tighten, but with flexibility
for those notes lowering, then growing higher,
opening the throat which choked on so much to say
at last in this way finding the means to breathe.
How what pressed against the diaphragm breaks
so the squeezed lungs, released from such a cage,
are instruments bellows-wide with a clarity
for what was lodged down being like
the heart’s mind caught on a hamster wheel
turning by burning with a rapidly cycling face,
laugh, words, gestures, frame – the most painful scenery
in that entangling emotional wilderness
shared with no other soul while the one
whose an obsession, accidental, remains scot-free,
never thinking of the other, let alone having
an inkling of feeling.
This music here releases all of that as a funnel upright –
tornado of torpor passionate, but also controlled frenzy,
an aria spirit-freeing the choice between rivers, mythic,
of Lethe & Mnemosyne.
Will these syllables sung lose themselves to waves
which bring forgetting, a balm of fog to later fall
in such anguish again, dumb to the first time
blank as a lamb some sky of steel takes?
No, moan blues, clarify, remembering to articulate everything
in currents of western turbulence to rise from shining,
bathed to love wisely, ears on a harmonious tune
composed so far deep from within
that to sing of it is quenching as peaceful Paradise attained.