There is this music I hear.
It sounds exactly
the way perfume smells:
intoxicatingly sweet but
dizzying if you inhale
too much at once.
It’s the kind of music you play
when you’re too sad
to listen to anything else
because somehow
this music manages
to understand you.
It hurts to listen
to this music
as pretty as it can be,
it’s the kind of music that
stops lungs
from filling with air
and hearts
from filling with blood
but I listen anyway –
it is the one song
I always want to hear.
I hear this music,
everywhere I go,
it tells me tales
of the woeful
and the damned,
singing to me
asking for my help
to make them feel less hurt
the music, you see,
is a call from
the broken people
of this world,
searching desperately
for someone
to take pity on them,
their music is a
beautiful plea for help,
soft and sad,
with piano key notes
falling like raindrops
into the palm of my hand
and I am taken with it,
in love with the idea that
perhaps I can offer them
some comfort,
reassure them:
everything will be okay –
after all,
what harm can it possibly do
to listen to their voices
in this ever so lovely
music?
And it is lovely!
But then the tempo begins
to pick up as if the music
is catching its breath,
so imperceptibly at first
I don’t notice
until the shriek of a violin
joins the piano,
until this pretty, sad song
becomes discordant and piercing
I fall to my knees,
because these sad songs
have become violent
and the violence of their pain
is terrifying,
I can feel the music
wrapping around me
like a hand clasping my neck
but I am trapped now –
I cannot stop listening.
Between chords,
I hear the pleas
and the screams
of the tortured,
their hands slip between
my ribs
and into the vault of
my chest
to steal pieces of my sympathy
so that maybe
they can feel whole again
and I let them,
because I know they are starved
of kindness, only doing this
to sew their own fragments
back together
but the tapestry of my tolerance
is beginning to loosen,
I am beginning to resemble
a patchwork of parts:
the more I give,
the more they take,
pulling me apart
stitch by stitch
to stop the fraying
of their own psyche –
and the more threadbare I become.
Their music is anarchy in
ragged notes,
begging me to listen
just a little while longer,
ease their pain
just a little bit more
and while I wrap my
arms around them,
they eat out my heart
making meals of my pity
because maybe then
they won’t feel so empty.
Parasites of my benevolence,
they weave their shrieks
into the soundtrack of my mind,
I hear them everywhere:
they cry out from the spaces
between my dreams,
they howl in unison
with the screeches of the wind,
dancing dissonant two-steps
beneath streetlamp spotlights,
looking for a stage
and an audience
to witness their misfortune,
I hear their woeful music
everywhere,
like choruses of knuckles
knocking on the
scope of my mind,
they have tasted
my compassion
and cannot be satisfied with
anything less than that now
they will do anything for more
I want to help
I am infatuated with the idea
of being a good person and
I don’t know how to settle
for anything less,
even though the music
hurts to listen to.
I can barely remember
how sweet and soft
it used to be,
yet I do not stop:
we who are empathetic
will always hear the music –
There is no way out.
Perhaps there is a small,
masochistic part of me
that lusts after my own
destruction;
I cannot bring myself
to turn away from the music!
They are manipulating
my compassion
to make me stay
I know I should be
running away
but this music
is all-consuming,
it would be so easy
to lose myself in the
poetry of their pain –
after all
there is something
unspeakably romantic
about the tragedy of
involving yourself with someone
dangerous.
And so I listen to the music,
I lose myself in
these concerts of agony
these compositions of injury,
I hear their screams
I feel them pull
the strings of my pity,
using me
like a bandage
and a battery
at the same time,
I hear the twisted siren song
and I am drawn to their pain,
giving the relief they seek
even though it means
I begin to bleed,
I have been made
into someone who seeks out
her own misfortune;
I never want to stop listening!
The music is inside of me now,
my heartstrings have been
drawn and pulled
and used like a violin –
these melodies of madness
are mine now.
They have me hooked
on my own destruction
with these
cocaine symphonies
they sing me –
and I embrace it.
Image Citations:
https://www.hercampus.com/school/akron/emerging-female-pop-artists
http://rebloggy.com/post/illustration-arms-hands-charcoal-violin-artists-on-tumblr-stacy-fahey-violinist/35345749924