Music

All music
is a tribute to silence.
The Muse herself is mute.
We ascend with sound
the sacred mountain
where She resides
to reach at last a summit
where we fall silent.
It is in the silence
that we succeed.

It is a high wire act,
walked with breath bated
between twin infinities,
waiting for that pin drop,
that catastrophe of chords,
tunes tumbling in staccato cascade
from disastrous exhalation
to interrupt
our death defying trance.

It is a dance upon
a frozen lake
with ice so thin
that to stand still
would be to fall in.

It is the ecstasy
of nothingness,
the garland we lay
on our own grave.
The sound protests
the end of memory.
In silence we accept
all protest fails
and we are forgotten
even by ourselves.

The purpose of music
is to destroy itself
by reducing everything
to silence:
not a simple
absence of sound,
but a silence shared
by airless places
on other worlds
and in-between spaces
approached
through a labyrinth of sound
in which we are lost
as we walk backwards
into the light
seeing a shadow
we think is us.

All music
is a tribute to silence.
The Muse herself is mute.
We ascend with sound
the sacred mountain
where She resides
to reach at last a summit
where we fall silent.
It is in this silence
that we finally succeed:
it is from this summit
that we see a world
in which we do not exist.