Once played to attentive faces <br />music has broken its frame <br />its bodice of always-weak laces <br />the entirely promiscuous art <br />pours out in public spaces <br />accompanying everything, the selections <br />of sex and war, the rejections. <br />To jeans-wearers in zipped sporrans <br />it transmits an ideal body <br />continuously as theirs age. Warrens <br />of plastic tiles and mesh throats <br />dispense this aural money <br />this sleek accountancy of notes <br />deep feeling adrift from its feelers <br />thought that means everything at once <br />like a shrugging of cream shoulders <br />like paintings hung on park mesh <br />sonore doom soneer illy chesh <br />they lost the off switch in my lifetime <br />the world reverberates with Muzak <br />and Prozac. As it doesn't with poe-zac <br />(I did meet a Miss Universe named Verstak). <br />Music to me is like days <br />I rarely catch who composed them <br />if one's sublime I think God <br />my life-signs suspend. I nod <br />it's like both Stilton and cure <br />from one harpsichord-hum: <br />penicillium - <br />then I miss the Köchel number. <br />I scarcely know whose performance <br />of a limpid autumn noon is superior <br />I gather timbre outranks rhumba. <br />I often can't tell days apart <br />they are the consumers, not me <br />in my head collectables decay <br />I've half-heard every piece of music <br />the glorious big one with voice <br />the gleaming instrumental one, so choice <br />the hypnotic one like weed-smoke at a party <br />and the muscular one out of farty <br />cars that goes Whudda Whudda <br />Whudda like the compound oil heart <br />of a warrior not of this planet.<br /><br />Les Murray<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/music-to-me-is-like-days/
