"modal" poems
Hear the bass, grace notes race all over the place
Cymbals paced, hi-hats chase, weaving between the bass
The piano - chords struck with wide spanned hands
Poly-rhythmic, multi-layered sounds in strands
The timbre of reed vibrating against warm metal
Precision; a sixth, a ninth and an eleventh interval
A major, a minor scale; a frantic modal sweat
A small sound for mankind; but a truly giant step
Each note slices through the eclectic beat-drop
Singing and whispering this post-modern be-bop
Multi-phonics scream, like controlled feedback
The seductive saxophone – this weapon of attack
The boundary is stretched, new ground broken
The holy saxophone has never thus spoken
And I pay homage, all my deepest respects
Go to the man who made those giant steps
Aug 22, 2011
Aug 22, 2011 at 9:25 AM UTC
Ripples of intention on green water,
Little drops of dissonance in a modal symphony.
How ugly they seem, ruining the serenity.
Yet what would it be without them?
An ocean without waves,
Sterile and alien:
Merely air turned bitter and dingy,
Like a stagnant fog in silence.
Could we call it the sea without that gentle murmur,
A mother's reassuring whisper
To her frightened babe?
And the stay of the light on a featureless mirror,
Nothing but a cruel reflection
Of grotesque perfection?
Not the sea, but a purgatory,
Ugly in every impeccable detail.
It is only with amorphous intention,
Impressions of consciousness,
That the golden sun can play
In the dimpled sand, the swaying grass,
And the eyes and souls of artists alike.
It is only in the imperfections
That beauty can truly be seen:
Admired for its perseverance
In the face of nature's adversity.
Where else would raindrops fall?
Aug 10, 2012
Aug 10, 2012 at 1:15 AM UTC
When you like somebody so much but you don't know how to tell him,
When you are not sure about what you feel.
When you want to ask him to stay longer but he has to pick up his mom.
When you can't hide the disappointment on your face.
But he said that this soon shall pass.
When he said he was attracted to you
When he hugs you and buries his face in your hair,
When he looks at you with his baby blues so clear
When he laughs with you
When he listens so attentively when you talk
The world is filled with colors
When you knew it was coming
But you thought you could dodge it
When he sat down and said sorry.
When he texts you, When he said he would text you
When he talks with modal auxiliary verbs.
When he tells you his family history.
When I see his eyes brighten
When I think I am falling but don't know his side of story.
are all fragments of our memories.
When he said it's still beautiful to leave when you have developed feelings.
Remember me when you leave.
Jan 28, 2017
Jan 28, 2017 at 12:06 AM UTC
Twirl your tastebuds —
let me taste your
modal schwa
your vellum staining
truth or dare,
let me down
your feather-quill;
your quenching quantum
quaking.
Apr 22, 2014
Apr 22, 2014 at 11:56 PM UTC
Gotta take a ‘selfie’ before I’m outta bed
Mum calls me down for breaky - Open Facebook up instead
My sister dobs me in – I tell her to take a hike
Quick up load the photo, and hope I getta ‘like’.
Gotta take a ‘selfie’, gotta getta ‘like’
Dad says it isn’t healthy, my sister says I’m ‘psych’
Take my Ipad into class, gotta get the high score
English teachers raving – But poetry’s a bore
She catches me on ‘chat room’ and takes away my phone
Beg my friend for last year’s modal, I gotta getta loan.
Gotta take a ‘selfie’, gotta getta ‘like’
Dad says I should get healthy- I take a gopro on my bike
Grumble to my parents – Life just isn’t fair
I haven’t got my Iphone and no one wants to share
Mum doesn’t want to hear it, she has no sympathy
Just as well there’s X-box, and by Mp3
Gotta take a ‘selfie’, gotta getta ‘like’
Don’t tell me to think healthy, I think my brain’s on strike.
Jun 22, 2015
Jun 22, 2015 at 7:32 PM UTC
There’s just… all this noise… There’s all this noise and I feel like a tone floating around in some kinda modal stasis. And I just want to change the key but I can never seem to get the voice leading right.
There’s all these other intervals in here with me and we’re all packed in too tight. I’m just a chromatic scale descending into dissonance as I push past clusters of minor seconds.
I feel like I’ve gotta fight to find consonance, but I’m so **** quiet that nobody can harmonize with me. Nobody can even hear me over all this noise all this noise all this noise. This noise when so many sing without listening. This noise of a thousand unheard melodies.
This noise this noise this noise
This noise this noise this noise
Jul 26, 2015
Jul 26, 2015 at 6:41 PM UTC
Alexander K Opicho
(Eldoret, Kenya;[email protected])
But I remain a believer in my ancestral religion
Whose God is wele but not the Germany world, it is a religion,
Like most of universal ancestral ones,
With appalling moral threshold,
When Elijah Masinde of dini ya Misambwa
Despised those who condemned man as notoriously religious
He meant human religious approach to life is absolute in nature
However diverse religions compete for human ears
Rich ones glorified in the luring away of modal ears
But all are devoid of spiritual impetus
Disappointing the progenitors of religious imperialism
These short-cutters in matters of sanctimony
Will not come to our heaven
They will get me sharing a cup of tea
With my sister- in-law; Mary, the mother of Jesus
And I will shun them, I will not know them
I will not invite them to a heavenly cup of tea
They will be suffocated by cadaverous appetite,
For we honor our religion with ancestral regard;
The Faith of Our Ancestors
But in ridicule they call us kaffirs, pagans, christo-pagans,
Animists, atheists, gentiles, non-believers, mediumists,
Rebellious rebels or whatsoever they call us;
The anti-muhamedan-mis-christologists,
Let them delude themselves,
If they disparage us with sick contumely
Abreast the dumbfounding development in sciences
Plus so fortuitous humanistic awareness,
Humanity in Religion has to adjust optimally
Religious masters have to help
Interpret the religious Books, bible, gita, quran
All Written or verbalistically in the glory of epical orality
In tandem with the best centered
Life extant,
Otherwise selfish religions becomes an old wine bag
With its old and stale wine,
You will persuade Russian carousers to drink
But to your chagrin, none will condone, your stale wine
Do not seek to sell your faith
Because every human community
Has an ancestral faith
Respect them all for that is gods in their accolade of
Omonipresecence,
Any man or woman without religion is dangerous
But do not advantagize yourselves
At the expense of people of other faiths
It is good you reciprocated
Planet earth is our only sure and known abode
If we lived well here, and there is another world
For those who will be good, we hope the conclave of Gods
Would all sit in judgment for their credit
And reward those who helped humble humanity
Of their religions as well as those of other religions
As for all the Gods love humanists.
Dec 17, 2013
Dec 17, 2013 at 10:17 AM UTC
One more day, one night less. Memories seem to fade along with the sands of time. Paper and pen run scarce as my thoughts flow through them, flushing away all thoughts not worth the ink. Cards flying, dices rolling, but the clock hands don’t seem to spin.
Standing inside these walls while my mind drifts outside. Like a crow, through the bars and over the walls I travel. I can go anywhere, but there is no place I rather fly to than a place my mind needs yet to know. From all the places I’ve been to, all the people known to me, my heart always takes me to the same person. But where do we meet? There are not enough shared memories to fill this void, so every night a new one is created. Every night I take her to visit my own favourite time and places, in the hope that one day I can actually show her the world and create our own memories. But will she go? Am I worthy of this blessing? One can only hope, so that turned into a routine.
Life as is, reduced to a bi-modal state, echoing over two desires. The one where I am freed from the restraints on this place and the one where I get restrained in her arms. The latter one, true freedom.
Aug 3, 2018
Aug 3, 2018 at 12:01 AM UTC
Nick was a lost boy
With a whispering heart
He held proper Victorian sadness
Until his public strength bowed
As it does with the artistic type
His soul beating modal
And his mask of gilded paper mache
With glue dripping and drying to fragile dreams
He needed to get back to the pastures of Tanworth
Yet London had other ideas
And his stiff upper lip cracked
He was a poet, you see
Who danced with trees...
And everyone knows
Butterflies don't ride bikes
Though that would be beautiful
To see one on a banana seat
Sailing down a country lane...
Alas, butterflies can simply fly away if a bike objects
And feel no pain
But Nick was hurt as he fell to the ground
His sickly hunched posture told of a great weight
Shoulders struggled to shepherd the world
With only Flower his power
And Pen his staff
Sadness met the River Man
And the River Man broke down
Poor, the fame of falling poets
Rich, the earth’s garden of toiled words
Caked under soiled writers nails
A headstone,
"Now we rise
And we are everywhere"
His tailwind to us
Go and look at what our fellow poets eyes do see
And bid hello to another artist’s soul on parade
For, as with you, they too are simply lost
And desperate for a garden to share and grow
© 2019 MJL
Mar 29, 2019
Mar 29, 2019 at 3:58 AM UTC
Spotlights on us
seemingly illuminating
and otherwise blinding
can't see the audience
can't tell the difference
between time and space
different manifestations
of each other creating
infinite mandalas
poured into rivers
tones rising out
of and falling into
silence
I trip over words and pick the sounds out of the scrapes in my palms
I make motions to pick up the gravity but my actions are glitchy, disconnected
an abstracted cadence
remote inflection
radio nuance
rhythm break
modal static living in stasis
ants on a screen as grains of rice
with bubbles in a glass of beer
merging like two tones
harmonizing on a
secondary tonal plane
move me like a modulation
end me like an infinite crescendo
I am suspended
over several tones
just let it go
and I am resolved
follow where the voices lead
Dec 26, 2014
Dec 26, 2014 at 10:22 AM UTC
Brushwork
If I were a jazz pianist I would pay
my dues in one lump sum on a tip
from some country singer on his way
down who gives me the shirt off his back
a Nudie with piping and plenty
of rhinestones that catch the stage
lights just so and sweep in reflection
across the polished planes of my 1890
rosewood Steinway Grand Modal C
a beaut with a pedigree, one I won’t fail
to mention from the stage in the second set
during the pause between How High The Moon
and I Love The Life I Live from behind
a bobbing cigarette, sharing the remarkable
fact that this is the very same piano
Mose Allison played in a two night stand
at the Blue Note in 1962. Later I’ll work Jimmy
the trumpet player’s name into a tune and trade
winks with the guy on upright bass
the drummer slack jawed oblivious, lost
to us all in some very tasty brushwork.
Oct 10, 2016
Oct 10, 2016 at 7:49 AM UTC
snaking through a modal-jazz fine-tuned evening
this soft huddle of sweat and tender bodies
it was purely girls strobed, fired upon by the oncoming *****
of a maddened hand;
slowly becoming inured to this droning of the blameful balm
of evening, always when ennui starts
to wane I will start the car
and take myself to the edge of everything
and all the suddenness becomes inept
and I myself
a shot in the total dark
making it final
somewhere in Quezon City
given a levitation and you
are somewhat veined to my wall of disgust
the same as
finding an old, forgotten thing
you
have no use for.
Apr 2, 2016
Apr 2, 2016 at 1:05 AM UTC
you are all of the mind’s dirtiest trick:
a weathered image of Magdalena,
a sleight of hand and a swirl of skin.
defying the laws of inebriation like a culprit
set loose, or the pallor of the moon excreting its habiliments.
the old rancor of the tree from its spurious beating. vestal buds of autumn
frugal hands of drizzle in April, prostitutes pirouetting, pried open,
dissected in faces of the tabloids (their almost acrobatic supremacy on centerfolds)
all mangled like the unclear, yet certain picture of a 1990s havocked
retrospect.
you are all of the mind’s filth: a putrid modal-jazz entrapment
and I am that sad fellow at the elbow room of some dislimned establishment
falling as lithe as poppies in spring
only when my mind starts to sing freely, a clenched, harmonic framework
will my bones start to unloose in the ether, death with its ammoniac perfume,
closes in like an unwanted visitor with a bounty of silence drowning everything.
i imagine you anything but lustrous this evening.
there are certain points in the pressures of your gravity
that levitate to mere intersections of the finer points of ecstasy.
i imagine you all soft and plump as a word of salvage
without the vigor of blandishments when you start with your
own way of moving i imagine you as blunt as a dull knife
plunging into me – i imagine your sidereal satellites fail in their coverage
over impossibly the blackest of skies in February,|
i imagine you anything but clean
and all white and spruced up with the most
drenched light, real to the touch and swiftly moving across the afternoon
like wishing you all but perverse and anomalous
and strikingly beautiful.
Jan 10, 2016
Jan 10, 2016 at 8:27 AM UTC
Venus of Willendorf
You seemed so distant
Cool and aloof on slide
Perhaps I was projecting
In the warm dark womb
Of Lecture Hall B
A silent world but for fan racket
From the Kodak Modal 4600
Eager to please on stiff little legs
Nosing toward the screen
Where you teetered
On impossible feet
Fighting a losing battle
With gravity I found
Touching, *******
No one could ignore
A chassis built
As the bluesman said
For comfort not for speed.
I hear Willendorf is nice
This time of year
Hint of fertility in the alpine air
Your crazy braids beckoning
Braille to a blind man.
Sep 20, 2016
Sep 20, 2016 at 7:41 AM UTC
iron, a sure thing
industry
a thing to extract and strengthen
fire, a modal flow
throughout me
it gives skies to the iron
changing colors
is the fire
giving structure
is the iron
arriving at some point,
i survey and say
"that is impossible for me to know"
is it worth it to try and solve the puzzle?
i walk to the east
where i found a loose piece
and i played it a song,
there you are.
to be iron and fire
is much better than being
confused.
May 26, 2018
May 26, 2018 at 4:22 AM UTC
Born to a culture
common its faith
of shallow waters
schooled in this trait
Great motion of tides
ebbs most to modal tasks
like sand on beaches
the future's unmask
but without notice
some dove deep in fears
for comfort n solace
swam away with years
In the darkest of waters
a home made for few
where hope is deep
a new species grew.
Oct 29, 2019
Oct 29, 2019 at 1:35 PM UTC
Ideal brother
my brother finds solace in selfishness
praise to my brother
he is a capitalist
he finds pleasure in selfishness
he is as selfish as death
out of his selfishness, he
cannot even save his own life
he thinks himself a nation builder
saying God for us all and
every man for himself
he is my role modal
i envy his selfishness
in his hey day, he means dooms day
to others
i will patiently wait to see him
languish in agony.
at the prime of his youth
he wil stand alone against the
rest and purge them in dark silence
And at the height of his vigour youth
Skeletons in the closet will dawn on him
As his prides hall perish
Never to be seen again
Mar 11, 2020
Mar 11, 2020 at 1:12 PM UTC