Tag: Poetry About Music

Chris Pellizzari: “Nick Drake, The Handsome Fox”

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Nick Drake, The Handsome Fox
 
Nick Drake, Singer-Songwriter (1948-1974)
 (For Vera)
 
You’re the only musician I know
who sang songs
as if you didn’t want
anyone to hear you.
 
You are the fox,
who in his gallantry,
waits until night,
not to bark or howl,
but to scream.
 
The audience does not know you dreamt about them last night.
 
They look exactly like they did in your dream.
 
You see the guns bulging under their dresses.
 
The record companies don’t know
what it’s like
to be held
against your will
on stage
singing songs
to your executioners.
 
The fox dies
hidden in the brush
heard only by the hunters
who don’t really listen anyway.
 
Where can you hide on this stage?
 
Maybe you can sing yourself
into invisibility,
oh gallant fox!
 
A couple more performances
like this
and they’ll stop
showing up.

Which is what you really wanted
all along.
 
The music will once again
belong to the corner of your room
and childhood,
near the poster of the hunt
and the fox who runs away
in silence.

About the Author: Chris Pellizzari is a poet from Illinois. His work has appeared in Hobart, Gone Lawn, Slipstream, SoFloPoJo, Not One of Us, Counterclock, BoomerLitMag, Ligeia, and many other places. He is a member of The Society of Midland Authors. Pellizzari often writes about the gay poet Federico Garcia Lorca, who was murdered by Fascists in Granada, Spain in 1936. He thinks Lorca has a lot to say to today’s America regarding compassion and acceptance. 

Image Credit: Digitally altered image of a public domain photo of Nick Drake. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Ken Gierke: “Riding With Monk”

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Riding with Monk

Epistrophy, apostrophe,
brush these blues off of me.
Lift me off this loneliest of roads,
beyond these bare trees.

Even in their beauty,
these bones of winter
hold no answers,
only questions.

On this road of introspection,
you tease me with those keys.
I don’t blame you, but
I’ve had all the blues I can abide.

I’m not in the mood.
Give it to me straight.
I’m tired of chasing dreams.
Lend me yours.

It doesn’t have to be easy,
but these streets would look
a whole lot better with
blue skies and just a little green.

About the Author: Ken Gierke is retired and has lived in Missouri since 2012, when he moved from Western New York, where the Niagara River fostered a love for nature. He writes primarily in free verse and haiku, often inspired by hiking and kayaking. His poetry has been published or is forthcoming both in print and online in such places as Ekphrastic Review, Amethyst Review, Silver Birch Press, Trailer Park Quarterly, The Gasconade Review, and River Dog Zine. Glass Awash, published by Spartan Press, is his first collection of poetry. His website: https://rivrvlogr.com/

Image Credit: “Nachtconcert van Thelonious Monk in het Concertgebouw Datum” (1961) Public domain image courtesy of Wikimedia, CC0

Timothy Tarkelly: “The Baffled King”

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The Baffled King
For Leonard Cohen...and David, I guess

Compose hallelujah.
Try it. Take a pen and put it to paper,
watch the hallelujah
grow into some recognizable shape.

Now that you’ve failed,
compose an apology. Five or so couplets
that can cast your hubris as imagery,
a picture of you giving up, frustrated.
Crumpling paper as each attempt
sounds less and less like hallelujah.

Apologies are weak 
as long as they’re just words,
so go outside, take to the streets.
Talk to the first five people you see.

Make their lives easier,
mow their lawns, help their mothers
move into their last home. 
Give them twenty dollars,
so they cannot feel guilty
for eating out tonight.
Put an arm around their shoulder,
tell them it’s okay 
to have to apologize for things.

Now that you’ve made their problems your problems,
go home and apologize. In the mirror.
Who the hell are you
to give mercy? To decide
who needs it?

Feel lost. Pace. Walk your floor,
the same path in your carpet over and over
until you actually are lost. Baffled. Until every breath you draw
is an apology.

Now tie yourself to your chair
and remember that writers who deal in secrets
die unread. You will try again.

Compose an apology
in pencil. Proofread, erasing every appearance
of "you made me feel”

and replacing it with 
with forgiveness,
with a nod and a wink,
with hallelujah.

About the Author: Timothy Tarkelly’s work has appeared in Vocivia Magazine, Clayjar Review, Ekstasis Magazine, and others. He’s written several collections of poetry, including Angie and Her Roommate (Alien Buddha Press), Luckhound (Spartan Press), and On Slip Rigs and Spiritual Growth (OAC Books). When he’s not writing, he teaches in Southeast Kansas.

Image Credit: Harris & Ewing, photographer “Dog At Piano” (1936) Public domain image courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Nathan Graziano: “Stuck Inside the Supermarket with the Beautiful Blues Again”

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Stuck Inside the Supermarket with the Beautiful Blues Again

My wife told me to find the onion crisps
for a green bean casserole she was making
for Easter dinner at my parents’ house.
Perplexed, I confessed I had no idea where 
to start the search for the onion crisps 
and suggested we sauté a raw onion instead.
“Don’t be a smart-ass,” she said and rolled
her eyes and sent me on the quixotic quest.

So I roamed the aisles, Ancient Mariner-style,
and found myself behind a beautiful couple
in their late-twenties, olive-skinned and fit,
as they whisked past the chocolate cake mix
holding hands, their shopping cart filled 
with fresh vegetables and fish and goat cheeses
but no onion crisps or cream of mushroom soup
or any hint of the makings of a casserole.

Then Bob Dylan’s “Stuck Inside of Mobile 
with the Memphis Blues Again” started to play
in my head, entering like a silk-footed thief,
and I hummed it a decimal above the soft-rock
that fell like syrupy summer rain from the ceiling. 
The beautiful couple turned at the end of the aisle
and went on to live beautiful lives and birth 
beautiful kids, and I never found the onion crisps.

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About the Author: Nathan Graziano lives in Manchester, New Hampshire, with his wife. A high school teacher, he’s the author of nine books of fiction and poetry. Fly Like The Seagull, his most recent work of fiction, was released by Luchador Press in 2020. Graziano also writes a column for Manchester Ink Link and was named the 2020 Columnist of Year by the New Hampshire Press Association. For more information, visit his website: www.nathangraziano.com.

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Image Credit: Thomas J. O’Halloran “Shopping in supermarket” (1957) The Library of Congress (Public Domain)

Mike Cole: “Taken Up By Song”

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Taken Up By Song

You were singing
in your sleep,
and I chose not
to wake you.
It was the way a person sings
when she is wearing headphones
in the music department of the bookstore
and is taken up by a song.
It was the singing of a deaf woman
who is so happily carried off
by the rhythm she feels but will never hear
that one would never think of asking her to stop.
It was the singing of the spheres of space
that even in their discord suggest
places so distant and free of human grief
that they are populated by souls
that have traveled far enough
from what we are
to know
finally
          the most distilled peace.

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About the Author: Mike Cole studied poetry at  Fresno State College (1967 to 1971) and received an MA in poetry writing in 1992. Over a sporadic 50-plus year publication history, his poems have appeared in Antioch Review, Laurel Review, Midland Review, Blast Furnace, diaphanous micro, Thin Air, and other magazines, and in the anthologies Highway 99, by Heyday Press and Some Yosemite Poets, by Scrub Jay Press.  He lives in the Sierra Nevada mountains near Yosemite National Park.

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Image Credit: Hilma af Klint “Group X, No. 2, Altarpiece” (1915) Public Domain

Larry Smith “Guitar Lesson”

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Guitar Lesson 

My guitar has lost sound
shed like snakeskin
in a desert of neglect.
Wood and strings longing
for touch dry up and
barely whisper their song.

And I beg forgiveness,
shoulder in embrace,
fingertips stroking the pain
into song. Each day,
each hour, each moment
our love revives.

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About the Author: Larry Smith is the editor-publisher of Bottom Dog Press in Ohio, also the author of 6 books of fiction and 8 books of poems, and most recently Mingo Town and Memories: Poems. A retired professor of humanities, he lives and works along the shores of Lake Erie in Huron, Ohio.

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More By Larry Smith:

No Walls

Union Town

At The Country Store

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Image Credit: Juan Gris “Still Life with a Guitar” (1913) Public Domain