The Theory of Music

Descend

The music that came from the sky
Had to already be in descent.
So, we only ever caught a faint tune of receding madness
Collected, like rainwater
Without petrichor or invigorating bursts of squall,
Into tamed chants buckled to frail human words,
A flower plucked and for all its beauty, already wilting,
The light of life already dimming,
Like a dream told upon waking,
Like fingers on a drumhead,
Feeling desperately for the warm vibrating aftermath.

They were in agony then, seeking a form fit for gods
To see again the clouds and the light
A whisper, a cry
Something to bottle the thunder and the strange rains
That fell sometimes of their own accord
On bluelands they knew not the names of.
Some drug for the half-crazed mind
That sought to paint on the air with its eyes and ears
And the rest
All the rest
Left for the wilderness of the heart
To yearn and never fully find
And in that yearning and not finding
The music
That kept slowly expanding back into the sky.

Awaken

Music, a creature now strung into waking
Raises its many heads, and hence summoned, looks around
And is no longer content with its own mellifluous being
But must demand more ears, arms, legs,
And other corporeal beats, bits, and pieces.
And right away, fate too must intervene, so art meets artist
Like clouds making rain and the winds thwarting it in time to rekindle the fire.

Lead us through the land and string us along
To the strange rhythms of a mystic land.
Electric guitar, send your current through the spine
And raise and lift what was dying and renew again
Create in the ruins the sounds from the past
And make a gateway so all may coexist,
Feet by feet, arm in arm.
Welcome the ancestors and the primal future.
Allow the free floating wind to howl sand and grate
And wail along the columns, lengthening itself into shadows
Of longing frozen in orgasmic pandiculation
An oblivion that must in eternity come to know of everything
With a promise to forget.

Painting the Silence

Disturb the silence
And leave a ghost of a ruin behind where the tunes must continue to haunt alone
Looking for the ones who created them and where they came from
If not the sky?
Life rushes around them at different speeds
And the tunes continue at the pace they were set to, in all their innocence and metered programming.
The wind, the ancient musician, roams through space
The water, a songstress, sings and roars, as does the fire and the land.
Why else gravity holds them so close if not to hear more closely
What they all have to say?
The birds too join in.
Men and women look at the sky and wonder how
There are many wars but only one stream of peace
And all that rests on chance and destiny, like love.

Leaves and lives fall into place like notes and sounds
And then they say it is just music.

Rise

After the first hint at awakening
Things are bound to fasten up and escalate to a finished state
That gets as close as it can get to the original sound
Without ever being it
And that too only lasts for the time being.

But that first eye of the nightwatch
On the waiting hill
Forever follows you home.

Birth a God

Music is what it takes to birth a god
So there can be life and death
Flood and draught
Happiness and sorrow
For things to rise and fall
For time to move again
One beat, one breath.

Song of the Spheres

The universe feeds energy to the machine
And watches it respond.
What is that which moves to music
Like the waves to the light of the moon?
This predictability of a pattern
And the breaking of it,
Between the moment and its eternity.

In zeroes and ones,
The spheres sing.

The glances they exchange on screen
Converge and diverge
And in their coming together and being apart is born again
The music of life.

Stars, Lies, and Languid Eyes

I see Akbar in a dream, waiting on a horseback
And the moonlit blue sky fading over paper pink flowers
Like a still from a movie set, forever crafted into predictable space.
The stars look down somewhere from far above
But are hidden to him just like the future is
Though you and I can read it in history books.
Yet I wonder how much he can see in the swish of the horse’s tail
And the back and forth restlessness of the hooves on spot.

Moments fly in space all at once
Like dust suspended in the sun.
Here is the randomness in mathematics, he says,
Flirting with all the borders, boundaries, and edges
And their crossing and filling up,
Holding close alike the silence and it’s theft.

The Origin of Sound

Music, that taste of eternity in a packet
Is a tease that promises to leave us hanging.

The stars still in ecstasy
Invite us to scream the self into a shared oblivion,
And make music of our joy and sorrow.
Our ancestors, they say, have developed a taste for
Astromusic, alien music.
The universe laughs at us with its secrets.
As furious, strong, and original as ever,
Distant quasars continue to dream.

The record that continues to revolve with the planets
On repeat like a cosmic prayer
In an otherwise silent room,
What can it manifest?

The rich music of the lonely.
The weightlessness.

And in all this vacant space

The First Force, The First Sound
A breath taken and never returned.