Vibrato, so noticeably absent in the compositions of the Renaissance & Baroque, in throbbing abundance centuries later.

Vibrato, the wobble, the waver, the uncertain spasm, the sine wave.

Vibrato was always there, waiting like a snake in the boughs; early composers just denied it and stretched the spasm to a straight line.

Sine wave, sin wave. The heady decadence of the throb and pulse.

Vibrato. As true as it can be, as beautiful as it can be in its honest correspondence to inner states of tumult and passion, it can also be just as false, full of handwringing and desperate jerking.

I cannot sing without vibrato. When I do I get restless, even in the space of a bar. I long to, maybe for the same reasons the early composers wrote without vibrato. Not to lie but to quiet the anxious waver within; as defense against that succulent spasm.

Color: A Perversion

I’m a fat nurse in my long black hall-sweeping shroud.
Syphilitic, belly-scarred, I take white planes through white clouds.

I only eat foods dyed blue, from beets to garlic bread.
The model’s pose just saps me cold. I slowly paint him red.

I come home to the pulsing green wire and whirr of machine.
Mustard yellow walls in the hammock room where I go to dream.

I dream of real men, carved from cliffs, in purple helms and gowns.
I wake in sweat when silver trees crack: the hidden skin was brown.

Two Dream Filaments In Succession

   A pavilion, eight or nine of us left, waiting, sprawled on grass. Some of us living in abandoned cars, others spread out on blankets. Dwindling food and water.  Long since having accepted what was to come.
   Still, we laughed, we were bound and being drawn closer every day.  We flirted, snapped; we formed alliances, we tore them up and scattered them and danced on top of the leaves. Everywhere warmth and a heightened sense of living, a bloom in skin and voice and being as if all of us were pregnant for the first time.
   As if death was a friend, a game when you are forced to rely on others only.  When you are reduced to just relations and interaction. Death the magic, death the quest; not resigned to in despair, or looked to with insane hope, just felt constantly with a kind of quietly ecstatic fulfillment.
   So much glad surrender of self into other.  Death the only possible issue of so much fulness.

   We’re in the tropics. The old woman pauses at the gate, now chained shut, confused & alarmed, lifting the chain, looking at me.
   How could I explain it to her? They chained and locked down the lot, my house and her house both. Everyone dead.
   Anyway, how was it she didn’t hear the shots, the screaming? I think about it, suspicious. My mind’s screenwriters slipping, plot splintering in favor of morality, message.
   The chains somehow slacken, untangle and collapse with the barest breath of sound. We slip out together.
   In our flight, she grows younger. Who is she? At first a doddering and half-pathetic creature who can’t possibly be able to help me. Now a younger woman, not quite beautiful, but with serene features, quiet, wise and strong.
   There is a baby still in the compound. We meet a doctor in a cafe — arrogant, whirling with amphetamines, ugly –  trick him into going there with his staff to help and treat everyone but also to bring back the child.  He agrees.
   Later, mother. She walks with a near-deformity, her right foot turned inward and clawed. I try to point it out to her, I even go so far as to mimic her walk. She laughs and dismisses me.