Showing posts with label goodbye piano. Show all posts
Showing posts with label goodbye piano. Show all posts

Sunday, November 6, 2016

Ode to the Ivories

Everything was so black and white about you.
telling
the story of clarity and morality in the world
never any grey realms
to sort out like spouses gone rogue.

People either struck the proper notes and
dissonance
didn't exist
or you were Stravinsky and you had some sort of free pass on
ushering in a new Rite, of sorts.

You held a space
like some sort of sophisticated therapist
parked
waiting with a tissue for the running emotions
to flood the chaise lounge.

And now you are gone somewhere else
banished
from my little world to some never-never land
where I can never see or touch you again.
But that isn't the worst part.
You were never about all the things he was about.
And now
it is as if someone
who once understood me is gone.

In your out of tune way,
You were always about
hitting
the center of the true note like one can with a Bach-Strad and singing "on key"
in a strangely Gramps sort of way,
meaning
charmingly lovable, yet off key.

Damn, I miss you.

Tuesday, September 20, 2016

Fare Thee Well, Ivory Girl

Technically, the ole girl has no monetary value whatsoever. Indeed, probabilities are high that she's the kind you'd stumble across discarded behind some smelly, old tires in the corner of a thrift store, her only companions "Chopsticks," clunking children, taunting their chasing parents with temporary locator spell melodies.

No one, is likely to pay money to take her home for the night.

But She was there, like the Giving Tree, waiting for me day after day to take a seat. She was there in so many of the moments of overload where the lump caught in the throat. She was there when the fingers longing to send the melancholy into her bowels, refused catharsis because the soul yolk was just too deep to spill all over her keys. She held the silence like stone for months between the notes in spite of this being the antithesis of the purpose of her being. She was there, waiting. She had my back, as friend of my soul.

But He was there too. He saw the creative connection we had and didn't understand it or like it. Maybe, he was jealous of her. Maybe somewhere in his traumatic past, the Dementors had sucked his soul away, because he didn't really understand soul anymore, perchance he ever did.

Her fate was sealed by my deep love and soul connection to Her. If only I'd known to hide my love for Her a little bit better. A Michigander we'd rescued, She'd ridden the bumpy road to us on the back of a pickup truck when homelessness had threatened as some church decluttered. But the truth of the matter is that She was the one who rescued me.

She held me close many the dark night of the soul when the light in my thread bare heart nearly disappeared behind the veil. She offered shelter from the emotional abuse and gaslighting swirling in the living room air like desert dirt devils. She soaked up my tears like a sponge when there was no shoulder to cry upon, as I held my breath hoping the thin walls did not betray me, telling Him of my fear in the dark.

During the divorce proceedings, He held her as ransom. She unwillingly became his pawn. He could never understand her creative capacity for space holding. He could never understand Her soul holding. He could never really see Her true value, She was just a decorative piece of furniture to Him that mattered to me.

She was no Bosendorfer, no Steinway & Son, no Fazioli, but she mattered all the same.

He needed Her only for the sake of my isolation. He needed to have Her only to destroy me. He needed to separate us like a teacher keeps the young school girls apart to keep them from giggling in the corner of class too much. He needed Her to crush the good and kill anything soulful, anything foreign to him--that which He will never understand. He will never get the realm of soul. You can't if you have none.

But, he didn't count on this: you can't kill something that has sporified into something more. If He'd even understood the ethereal realm one bit, he'd know from the Velveteen Rabbit that you can't destroy something that has transformed itself by the act of love and sacrificial space holding.  

.....................................................................................

And so I let go of you, dear friend of my soul, ethereal Ivory Girl. I bid thee farewell. May you find your way to another in need of your musical healing. May you continue on in your work. And though mere spinet melody holder to some--to Him, somehow, you were and always will be so much more to me. Somehow, like the Velveteen Rabbit, you crossed thresholds. You became something more real. You came to inhabit the immaterial, invisible land of soul. And I suppose once you inhabit this land, no one, not even a narcissist who knows nothing of real, nothing of soul, nothing of the beautiful, creative invisible realm, can ever rob you of this bit. Farewell my beautiful dancing Ivory Girl.