Apology for Music

I guess there was something feckless about my love for sound, a feverish translation of material — freckles, child labor, the anticipation of a life sentence — into the sweet dark tongue of the universal. To curate the spine and its three curves into the lilt of a body not limned by the numbed senses. Musik fliegt wenn ich fliegt: If I fly, the music will fly — my urge, to conquer space with sound, to hold no philosophy in the roar and whir. I set the quartet in four machines, plotted a tonal flight plan, plotted against the human, fed her colliculi inferior and superior by mic, click-track, force. On the downbeat, the copters lifted —first notes arrived back on earth like ovular bodies that had tunneled inward to unseat the quite hollow of a soul. When the tonnage of steel and glass split the horizon, I knew I’d never make a sound, not broken, not otherwise.

“Apology for Music” first appeared in Corresponding Voices, Spring 2011, Vol. 4.