My Musical Autobiography

In the beginning …

The start of my musical life – a series of monologues amplified by extracts from music that’s mattered to me
Life began in the 1960s

There’s more to the story …

There’s more to life than the Sixties

My parents helped make me …

The Classicals & the French

Moving

IMG_9960

Moving

(for BKB)

Our kitchen clock has ticked,
time to pack up,
time to clear out,
cardboard boxes,
still life on the living room floor.
A full-stop.
Another paragraph written.

This house has done its work.
Candles burnt.
We were here,
a joint composition,
major and minor keys,
melody,
atonality,
dissonance,
harmony.
Unfinished symphony.

More than poetry.
Infinity of haiku
silent rooms between
characters.
On this stage,
we voiced parts,
fashioned scripts,
co-authors.

I’ve written my way through this house,
stepped beyond the deck,
out into a backyard
to trees and stream
underneath snow.
(Memories in parentheses)
Our kitchen, hearth of home,
chairs, a shrunken table,
furniture that made space grow.

Chicken noodle soup from a can,
potato chips,
grapes,
milk from a carton,
silver spoons,
our last supper.
I don’t know where we’ll eat tomorrow.

Never known the next phrase,
the sentence to come,
the chapter after this,
the story’s conclusion.

Like a hummingbird’s nest,
where we eat, drink, love, grow, sing,
shall we weave together twigs,
plant fibers,
bits of larch leaves,
shall we thread spider silk to bind our nest
together
and anchor
to another forked branch.

First Thoughts

 

We play on each other’s stages

to music we can’t hear,

sound out an echo

into a strange new background.

 

We meet each other in the familiar

and miss one another in the weather,

speak in diverse tongues

of pictures we’ll never complete.

 

We sound alike on the street,

on the top floor of the bus.

At the hairdresser we are all blown dry

and we all shed skin.

 

That’s where the story ends,

the adventure begins. The day starts

with the mass rising from sleep.

The joints connecting again.

ThoughtForToday – 5 December 

  

We are all musical animals 

– no matter 

how we play 

sing 

hear 

dance.

each has rhythm 

beat

tone

pitch

cadence

melody

– no matter 

what we profess

how much dissonance we make. 

So 

are you composing

performing 

or 

waiting?