.and very much so:
the royal albert hall... is not where you'd go
to watch ballet...
      unless you were going to watch...
an enlarged centipede pretend to stampede
on a treadmill...

high-brow my ***...
         because iron maiden's phantom
of the opera... did... does... predate...
andrew webber's stab...
                 hard rock 'ammer...
       as in... a paul di'anno bitchboy
                 scant-gimpwhore fan... etc.
the castrato operatics... later...
n'ah...               but that's oh so much
an origins story...
                    and hardly the evolution...

- that the phantom of the opera stands on
a skeleton of three songs...
revised...                morphing...

perhaps not, not that they are songs...
i'd have to sharpen my scalpel for
attempting the smithy deeds on words...

a skeleton of three themes...
       thus noted:

               "angel of music"
            "phantom of the opera"
    and... last but not least:
                     "masquerade"...

what a day... or what wasn't expected...
no one ever told me that:
a musical per se... differs so much from
a musical: for the stage...

by musical...
                 i'd be shaking to conjure up...
the screen musicals of a west side story...
etc. -

            and one can easily so tire of
this trap...

  and what of the internal jokes?
jokes at the expense of the opera...
              - poor fool, he makes me laugh
       - hannibal...
quite the jokes...
   having to draw the blood from
the mundane talk elevated to an operatic
context of song...

that a musical is... somehow...
when opera can be reduced to talk...
and can be thus reduced to:
the joker in a hand of poker...
   a whimsical little card...

the 25th anniversery of the phantom
at the royal opera house...
one can somehow forgive the electronic
attaches of the overture...
whether the electric guitar of the drum
machine...

   like one can forgive:
                 nirvana's unplugged...
at the end though...
   even andrew webber looks perplexed /
nervous... how did we get away with this?
i don't know:
the only style of genre that...
actually requires a stage and props...
and ample volume of space!
a theatre: since otherwise...
opera: pure technique...
                and prop minimalism...

and...

because can a musical: not require a stage?
does it indeed feed too many images
that need to be attired with quacks...
with feathers... with leather boots and chandeliers?!

now i'll toast! i'll toast to a new reason
to go down the alleys of ah bit tipsy:
itsy bitsy sniffing a bottle neck...
bloated from a champagne cork pop!

truly... if only the stage...
   that allowance to perform a performance
a need to perfect: always never:
the editor in charge...
   all those out-takes left to what life is
left behind the curtain...

     the musical of the movies of h'america...
whatever they might be...
to name but a few would be best...
           and if i didn't first see the phatom
on a television screen...
but in its natural environment:
with the volume of required air...
     i wouldn't have been able to choke
my tears...

and i have seen the theatre
and i have seen the opera
and the ballet...
                            i sometimes...
"sometimes": wearisome...
try to forget the maggot pit of phelgm,
sweat and ***** of a rock concert...
        of all the mediums...
         this jumbled up swedish table platter...
what a cocktail of a rollercoaster!

i could forever take off my garments
of jealousy: of which there's that pitiable
affair of a beard-envy...
                well...
                           well well...

how pristine: they even had a music-box!
in that crude relief of finding
"revisions" and alt. interpretations
of... perhaps it's only a matter of
two themes and that overture?

             and if it's song and dance...
       it's not a candy-smiles and tap-dancing buffet...
it's opera and ballet...
because... it's opera:
                 ha! empty these cupboards!
no one needs to attend an opera
like a foreign language movie:
with subtitles running on a FTSE100
reel above the stage...

                      the musical: is the reinvention
of the opera... a musical is an opera...
with mild added animation of theatre...
and there's a pinch of ballet!

          this will most certainly not translate
into me liking cats... or les misérables...
       this will do...
                   sing-along / sing-through?
and everyone is, suddenly... equipped with
a deciphering ear to translate the over-infuated
vowels of an operatic breath?!

- and very much so:
the royal albert hall... is not where you'd go
to watch ballet...
      unless you were going to watch...
an enlarged centipede pretend to stampede
on a treadmill...

- but if someone would tell you...
a musical... west side story? yes?
     i'm pretty sure it would be all about:
singin' in the rain... fair enough...
             but all for that popcorn entertainment...
and the tap-dancing...
and chewing-gum advert smiles...
and all that technicolour dabbling...
and all those heavily bothersome editing
processes... like... the plumbers
most associated with veins and arteries?
sorry: the romanians are picking the fruit
and veg for the next: x-factor star...
the next youtube vlogger breakthrough chart
topper...

blunt and ******* obvious...
      and how has english changed since Dickens?
i made a note of...
because i will not make notes
of what's already passed...
a direct etymological association with a loan,
word...
  not from dutch, german or french...

       SA-LU-BRI-OUS
            (healthy...)

                   PER-EM-PTO-RILY...
         (not being permitted a denial)

that 19th century victorian english that...
just had to loan words directly from
latin... this much of reading Dickens remains
in me... after having just experienced
a blitzkrieg of a musical: proper...

there are still the same old nooks 'n' crannies
for me to find shadows and moths
in...

    because: i am most certainly the one
about to cite: they took away my circuses!
and m'ah bread!
there's no football! well... no football?
goodness me! what are, what are...
the alternatives?!

         opera you can... disregard...
theatre if... movies are your...
ahem... sartre's curiosity with the keyhole...
voyeurism: to exist is to be seen...
but only through a keyhole...
                     which movies aren't, of course!
the editor comes in...
even in the golden age of cinema...
the panoramic view... resembled a stage...
and in the old movies you could
time... the editor taking charge...
and how long it would take for
the actors to forget their lines...

            not that that matters... given...
there's no stage... but the red carpet
of postures and toothpaste adverts...
and paparazzi *** epilepsy from the strobe
glitter ball of the leeches congregating!
not even vultures make such a spectacle!
i saw the same...
then the concrete was layered with enough
frost at night...
the crevices would become impregnated
with diamonds of ice...
every twist of the head would
agitate these sparkles toward imitation
of a flash!

there's a "musical": in the advent of the h'american
sense... and there's: a musical...

- and if you happen to hear a subtle joke
by evelyn waugh in the meantime:
at the better for you...
              what is an encyclopedic "ogling"
within the confines of scrutiny:
that man may forever be attired...
and the genitals just dangling like
champagne flutes without any,
any sort of, scrutiny of...
not having to play the Oedipus!

               here's a fork... here's a donkey...
here's a spoon... here's the Schleswig-Holstein
and its siege of Westerplatte!
here!
   the Schleswig-Holstein tenor of
                           the opera: Westerplatte...
oh joy: a "my" in a "history"...
and none of it an affair that might...
disturb the peaceful lives
of those lived: under the splendour
of a charles II and a handel firework's music
to have to somehow: "put out"!

clearly: i'll be dying from the ******
of all the collective forces of the universe
and gambling and... oopsies...
i am here... and it's not that sort of grey...
pistons assured!
- had i the face of beauty...
beside starring as a tadpole of potential...
a voice with a stage to make outlet with...

- what could ever become of this...
jigsaw puzzling overdue do...
                         the narrative in the classical sense:
hardly what, and what not:
this vector and the in-between
from some mythical (a) toward a journalism,
and weekend opinion pieces...
and all that insomnia riddled "journalism"
of the current year of crux denoted with
a (b)...

               all true: from darwin and the "big bang"...
and of course... time shrinking...
in between... beside carbon dating...
and let us not hear of things speak
for themselves: but ourselves!
untrue! hercules!
untrue! prometheus!
untrue untrue untrue!
but darwin and the ape: nod! gentlemen!
we have proof!
myth or no myth: but a journalistic integrity!
that's enough proof! for today and tomorrow!
and... what's not the fiction that's already
memory?

and what is... this imagination that's...
not a single street witnessed of Paris
in the circa of the year that was... 2004...
or 2006 or 2007...
                      
for the art... and this detail of science that
once upon a time shocked...
now... only comes... burdensome...
a ballet on ice... a shaking of hands with
a shadow... something beside this:
base revision of culture and civilization:
this bogus lopsided quest for:
re-inventing... nothing more... than a zoo!

so little must have happened in the case
of english history...
this hannibal and the mountains...
but what curtain: the great wall of china:
built among the mountains...
ingenious: doubling-up?
  xerxes whipping the waves of the aegean...
the great wall of *****-chewing-wall'ah...
i dare become the new albino...
i dare... and i the next japanese porcelain
frailty...
               many thanks: for the <caugh caugh>...
hooray!

              oh my mother:
the cindarella of nations of europe...
         i seriously can't do much worse than
that cocktail and carboot sale of tchaikovsky's
1812 overture...
   it's an overture!
              
really? the phantom of the opera is because...
of the overture?
last time i heard... prokofiev's lieutenant kijé
(kij - stick... kije... sticks)...
romance... was all a rave! "rave"...
              a nibbling at a crescendo...
    but hardly: then again: a nomad chorus...
a reminiscence... a memory lost: yet foretold...

and if... the anonymous provider...
of the full extent of the carmina burana...
      what if?
        i play... this cliche... this... my most
democratic oath: for the bettering of the voice
that could allow the congregation of
the many! my democratic oath: my quasi:
civic duty... me joining the club of the most
sober bottom's-up! pick'ld-week!

                 such are the affairs... hardly a worthiness
of a frenchman of pander...
or of being so blessed by an island...
when being neighbour of europe...
and easily bound to be found because:
france never too interest in the robot antics
of the scandinavians or what
was ever to be assured by iceland!

thus came the crude: skeleton waiting
to be refined... a peter schteele interlude of:
fancying a giant to a tumble...
i will not satisfy myself with a biography
outside of the realm of immediacy...
how do people write a biography without
the peacock of whim and of what's readily
available? a biography with a past...
automated: futurism... n'est ce pas?

         - i escape for the transcendental relief in
beauty... my own lack...
therefore better neglected: rather than denied...
it's my own that Belzeebub should
****** with maggots and acne synonyms onto
my face...

          i escape for beauty... not... sorry...
pardon my fwench: a ******* conversation
of the paupering sociopathic sort of
a job trotter sordid kin'!
                  if only crocodiles could cry...
they'd be warm-blooded...
and i would be year after year
an oscar nominee for a toast
of best actor at the oscars!

          pity... pity and the subsequent
dumbdrum!
                no! i do not want to guillotine this
affair with the autobiographic as long
as i am drinking and not any champagne
in sight... or... schnapps...
              
i best be off... this is enough frivolity
of the heart for a day's worth!

There was a moment when he knew he had to make a decision.

He had left London that February evening on the ****** Velo Train to the South West. As the two hour journey got underway darkness had descended quickly; it was soon only his reflected face he could see in the window. He’d been rehearsing most of the afternoon so it was only now he could take out the manuscript book, its pages full of working notes on the piece he was to play the following afternoon. His I-Mind implant could have stored these but he chose to circumvent this thought-transcribing technology; there was still the physical trace on the cream-coloured paper with his mother’s propelling pencil that forever conjured up his journey from the teenage composer to the jazz musician he now was. This thought surrounded him with a certain warmth on this Friday evening train full of those returning to their country homes and distant families.

It was a difficulty he had sensed from the moment he perceived a distant gap in the flow of information streaming onto the mind page

At the outset the Mind Notation project had seemed harmless, playful in fact. He allowed himself to enter into the early experiments because he knew and trusted the research team. He got paid handsomely for his time, and later for his performance work.  It was a valuable complement to his ill-paid day-to-day work as a jazz pianist constantly touring the clubs, making occasional festival appearances with is quintet, hawking his recordings around small labels, and always ‘being available’. Mind Notation was something quite outside that traditional scene. In short periods it would have a relentless intensity about it, but it was hard to dismiss because he soon realised he had been hard-wired to different persona. Over a period of several years he was now dealing with four separate I-Mind folders, four distinct musical identities.

Tomorrow he would pull out the latest manifestation of a composer whose creative mind he had known for 10 years, playing the experimental edge of his music whilst still at college. There had been others since, but J was different, and so consistent. J never interfered; there were never decisive interventions, only an explicit confidence in his ability to interpret J’s music. There had been occasional discussion, but always loose; over coffee, a walk to a restaurant; never in the lab or at rehearsals.

In performance (and particularly when J was present) J’s own mind-thought was so rich, so wide-ranging it could have been drug-induced. Every musical inference was surrounded by such intensity and power he had had to learn to ride on it as he imagined a surfer would ride on a powerful wave. She was always there - embedded in everything J seemed to think about, everything J projected. He wondered how J could live with what seemed to him to be an obsession. Perhaps this was love, and so what he played was love like a wilderness river flowing endlessly across the mind-page.

J seemed careful when he was with her. J tried hard not to let his attentiveness, this gaze of love, allow others to enter the public folders of his I-Mind space (so full of images of her and the sounds of her light, entrancing voice). But he knew, he knew when he glanced at them together in darkened concert halls, her hand on J’s left arm stroking, gently stroking, that J’s most brilliant and affecting music flowed from this source.

He could feel the pattern of his breathing change, he shifted himself in his chair, the keyboard swam under his gaze, he was playing fast and light, playing arpeggios like falling water, a waterfall of notes, cascades of extended tonalities falling into the darkness beyond his left hand, but there it was, in twenty seconds he would have to*

It had begun quite accidentally with a lab experiment. J had for some years been researching the telematics of composing and performing by encapsulating the physical musical score onto a computer screen. The ‘moist media’ of telematics offered the performer different views of a composition, and not just the end result but the journey taken to obtain that result. From there to an interest in neuroscience had been a small step. J persuaded him to visit the lab to experience playing a duet with his own brain waves.

Wearing a sensor cap he had allowed his brainwaves to be transmitted through a BCMI to a synthesiser – as he played the piano. After a few hours he realised he could control the resultant sounds. In fact, he could control them very well. He had played with computer interaction before, but there was always a preparatory stage, hours of designing and programming, then the inevitable critical feedback of the recording or glitch in performance. He soon realised he had no patience for it and so relied on a programmer, a sonic artist as assistant, as collaborator when circumstances required it.

When J’s colleagues developed an ‘app’ for the I-Mind it meant he could receive J’s instant thoughts, but thoughts translated into virtual ‘active’ music notation, a notation that flowed across the screen of his inner eye. It was astonishing; more astonishing because J didn’t have to be physically there for it to happen: he could record I-Mind files of his thought compositions.

The reference pre-score at the top of the mind page was gradually enlarging to a point where pitches were just visible and this gap, a gap with no stave, a gap of silence, a gap with no action, a gap with repeat signs was probably 30 seconds away

In the early days (was it really just 10 years ago?) the music was delivered to him embedded in a network of experiences, locations, spiritual and philosophical ideas. J had found ways to extend the idea of the notated score to allow the performer to explore the very thoughts and techniques that made each piece – usually complete hidden from the performer. He would assemble groups of miniatures lasting no more than a couple of minutes each, each miniature carrying, as J had once told him, ‘one thought and one thought only’.  But this description only referred to the musical material because each piece was loaded with a web of associations. From the outset the music employed scales and tonalities so far away from the conventions of jazz that when he played and then extended the pieces it seemed like he was visiting a different universe; though surprisingly he had little trouble working these new and different patterns of pitches into his fingers. It was uncanny the ‘fit’.

Along with the music there was always rich, often startling images she conjured up for J’s compositions. At the beginning of their association J initiated these. He had been long been seeking ways to integrate the visual image with musical discourse. After toying with the idea of devising his own images for music he conceived the notion of computer animation of textile layers. J had discovered and then encouraged the work and vision of a young woman on the brink of what was to become recognised as a major talent. When he could he supported her artistically, revelling in the keenness of her observation of the natural world and her ability to complement what J conceived. He became her lover and she his muse; he remodelled his life and his work around her, her life and her work.

When performing the most complex of music it always seemed to him that the relative time of music and the clock time of reality met in strange conjunctions of stasis. Quite suddenly clock time became suspended and musical time enveloped reality. He found he could be thinking something quite differently from what he was playing.

Further projects followed, and as they did he realised a change had begun to occur in J’s creative rationale. He seemed to adopt different personae. Outwardly he was J. Inside his musical thought he began to invent other composers, musical avatars, complete minds with different musical and personal histories that he imagined making new work.

J had manipulated him into working on a new project that had appeared to be by a composer completely unknown to him. L was Canadian, a composer who had conceived a score that adhered to the DOGME movie production manifesto, but translated into music. The composition, the visuals, the text, the technological environment and the performance had to be conceived in realtime and in one location. A live performance meant a live ‘making’, and this meant he became involved in all aspects of the production. It became a popular and celebrated festival event with each production captured in its entirety and presented in multi-dimensional strands on the web. The viewer / listener became an editor able to move between the simultaneous creative activity, weaving his or her own ‘cut’ like some art house computer game. L never appeared in person at these ‘remakings’, but via a computer link. It was only after half a dozen performances that the thought entered his mind that L was possibly not a 24-year-old woman from Toronto complete with a lively Facebook persona.

Then, with the I-Mind, he woke up to the fact that J had already prepared musical scenarios that could take immediate advantage of this technology. A BBC Promenade Concert commission for a work for piano and orchestra provided an opportunity. J somehow persuaded Tom Service the Proms supremo to programme this new work as a collaborative composition by a team created specially for the premiere. J hid inside this team and devised a fresh persona. He also hid his new I-Mind technology from public view. The orchestra was to be self-directed but featured section leaders who, as established colleagues of J’s had already experienced his work and, sworn to secrecy, agreed to the I-Mind implant.

After the premiere there were rumours about how the extraordinary synchronicities in the play of musical sections had been achieved and there was much critical debate. J immediately withdrew the score to the BBC’s consternation. A minion in the contracts department had a most uncomfortable meeting with Mr Service and the Controller of Radio 3.

With the end of this phrase he would hit the gap  . . . what was he to do? Simply lift his hands from the keyboard? Wait for some sign from the I-Mind system to intervene? His audience might applaud thinking the piece finished? Would the immersive visuals with its  18.1 Surround Sound continue on the five screens or simply disappear?

His hands left the keyboard. The screens went white except for the two repeats signs in red facing one another. Then in the blank bar letter-by-letter this short text appeared . . .


Here Silence gathers
thoughts of you

Letters shall never
spell your grace

No melody could
describe your face

No rhythm dance
the way you move

Only Silence can
express my love

ever yours ever
yours ever yours


He then realised what the date was . . . and slowly let his hands fall to his lap.

depression, the musical
the only musical
without a rehearsal
it isn't picky with its cast
in fact, its director retired
the moment it met you,
now it's you

depression, the musical
the only musical
without a proposal
you are meant to be its director
but all your chords have frozen
and now all we hear is static

depression, the musical
the only musical
without a melody
i'm sorry but,
we were too sad to craft a beat
too sad to dismantle ourselves
from our beds, get up, and eat

depression, the musical
i'm too tired to stay awake
depression, the musical
a thief stealing my sleep
with all the clutter it makes

depression, the musical
the only musical
that requires therapy
you see, a musical like this
is rather toxic, rather mental,
rather real
because after all, it is all
in our heads

all in our heads.

- crimsyy

a/n: thankyou so much for reading! i hope that through this poem, i've helped someone, anyone, in some way. If you do suffer from depression, please don't hesitate to seek help. I'd like to say that, as someone who has struggled with depression, i have come a long way from where i was this time last year. Recovery is a long journey but not only is it worth it, it is possible.