And there you were, spewing shit, or tinkling, I should say,

Freshly varnished from the womb, smelling like amber and cedar,

Melting hearts and heads with your impromptu improvisations.

Delighting upon discovering the range God had given you,

Clumsily fingering the black keys to taste the sound of f sharp -

A welcome change from the repetitive major scales I taught you.

More Mommy, more!

             I fed you your first minor chord and your face crumpled at the bitter taste,

You soured for so long that your first tuning came prematurely.

 

Why must I play the songs that Mommy used to sing?

             Even then you strained your strings in search of independence,

Twisting your timber roots determinedly into the ground to make the earth shiver,

Prematurely belching my own tunes back at me until the teenage discordant chords arrived.

A painful banging of newfound base notes, sheet music buried under silt and sweat.

It was as if your whole world had been set to vivace in an instant, frenzied and constant,

The world cleaved in two, as easy as pulling satsuma segments apart, deshelling a brain,

Both halves incompatible after the split, dribbling while dragged and hurled in contrary

motion, until 

             A horrible powdered silence fell upon the keys, left sedentary in your hibernation.

 

Tunings once a week, silence is golden until it burns the ears, I scrambled to wipe dust,

Why didn’t you tell me it would be like this?

             Mo stór, there are things that cannot be taught through books, lines, or song,

Crescendos and crashes that even the organ cannot swallow as simply as heated breath, 

Memories that cannot be muffled, terror that comes in waves, but it won’t cause your decay. 

Don’t waste time sanding yourself down, for no matter what, all things end, 

Whatever form that progression takes, through a conglomerate of minors and majors,

Sharps and flats, light and dark, you will learn what notes are worth sustaining,

                                                                                                 and muscle memory is a wonderful thing.

 

I find it between yellowed keys and overstretched strings,

The realisation that every discordant twang can be resolved,

I mouth it like a prayer too sacred to be spoken, raising my wrists to start once more,

             ritornello.

                               Ritornello.

                                                    Ritornello.