How Sweet The Sound

Location

My mind is no clockwork.

It has no mechanistic rules of a clock, has no one destination, or a repetitive circle of lines on the edge of Time.

My mind is constrained by the jail of clocks and schedules:

5:00 AM — Wake up take a shower brush my teeth

5:30 AM — breakfast downstairs. Come down honey

6:00 AM — get into the car child

6:59 AM — tick tick tick tick…

6:59; 99 seconds —tick—

7:00 AM — the bells ring. They shout. School begins.

It ticks me off.

 

Post-schooling schedule similarly

Programmed. 15 minutes review each material I learnt for each subject.

Then homework:

30 minutes Math; 60 minutes Language; 60 minutes Spanish vocabulary

60 minutes European history; 40 minutes Biology; 60 minutes Physics.

Sleep.

Tick tick tick tick…

Times up. The line has come full circle.

5 oclock—Wake up take a shower brush my teeth...

 

Focus, Concentration, deficiency of

Imagination are the keys to the chest of success

They say.

 

My life is a clock, but my mind surely is not.

 

My mind was once alive: think it and it was.

I was the architect of my universe.

I called, and volcanoes answered.

I spoke and my stuffed animal laughed.

I sang and the world would blossom.

Alas, I am no longer a child.

 

Relativity they tell you

But they do not tell you

Einstein found it through escaping the clocks.

Time is fluid, changing…

The physics that tells Time says so!

Can’t they see?

 

Yet in the incarceration of Time, I find my release:

Music.

A plethora of feelings to sense.

In the borders of fifteen minutes

I feel

The ocean collide against the shore of California last summer,

The unsullied air of freedom.

 

There is movement and direction,

Great velocity which slows my Time.

The violins rapidly

Accelerate to a

Climax in the scherzo of Beethoven’s

Choral Symphony.

 

With Music, I feel the fury

And anger God released in the Flood—

Yet even Methuselah

Did not live to experience that.

 

And I am a bird, flying through

The Amazonian air

Alive breathing fresh,

Through the flute.

 

And there is stasis and mourning.

I reminisce to China

And the warm evanescent

Embrace of departed

Grandparents.

Now it is infinite.

 

I swim slowly in a mix of unblemished

Honey, inhaling underneath

Through the reverberations of the cello.

 

With Music I am a rice cooker releasing my steam.

Though I cannot dance,

I am dancing in the Great Palace.

 

Through the timber of my clarinet

The awe and magnificent

Sense of triviality

In a Gothic cathedral

I experience in my room—15 by 15 feet.

 

Anything everything

I can feel,

For in order to understand

Music, one rules Time and rhythm.

 

It reverberates all around me

A blanket of sound

How sweet the sound of amazing grace!

My mind is released—My chains are gone!

Repeat this sounding joy. Joy to the world!

 

For a clock is a cell

Of repetitive thoughts,

But this Music subsumes the world

And all the feelings in it.

Comments

GeorgeRogers

Photo creds to Roberto Carnevali.
I apologize for the audio's bad quality or me breathing into the microphone.
To Power Poetry, I also published this work in Teen Ink.
 
Hope you all enjoy!

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