Articles/Essays – Volume 54, No. 4

Acoustic

Podcast version of this piece.

My devotion never translates to my fingers.
There is something lost.
The scaly chaff of my heart opens my lungs.
I pinch my pic like a quill
what can I scrawl in the dusk?

The eighth notes scream as I harmonize
endless Ds without a u
A whittler stripping the block’s clothes
keeping time at arm’s length
desperate for a revelation.

Em Am7 G D6 D. The progression is eternal.
I believe in the delicate vice on the fret
calluses encroaching on my prints. Their throb,
waking me in the night after a two-hour vesper,
is the closest I will come to purity.


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