88 Keys in Black and White

Posted on | August 21, 2011 | No Comments

as written the year after the year of The Room, when I was just starting the decade of my twenties. Everyone has the same need to find respite from our own inner darkness.

sneaking
over where’s the church stood
breathcomesfasthoping not to run
into those people or anything living.
standing
inside the unlocked door, (dark), to breathe in (hesitatingly)
the peace I still felt there.
felt I didn’t deserve it;
u-n-w-o-r-t-h-y- and dirty within its doors
but: I need to play.
shoulder! sharp pain pulls heavy against the grain-blue navy bag of notes.
I had hiked thru the loud complex,
thru the fEnCe, thruthelittlewood (scary) to be here.

did you hear me sigh?

halls are empty. pressing around me like deep water.
run my hand along the wall, palm cold against the white stone,
keeping to the darkest shadows.
find my way thru corridors until: I find the chapel.
no need to risk trying to find light, she doesn’t like me much.
brush my fingers atop the edge of the pews, and!
see the gleam of a grand in the corner.
it’sinsighthurryalittle; climb three little stairs,
drop my load, my life, my music, on the floor.
on the altar of the Son…
open the piano top: prop open so I can seefeel the strings: cords: the magic of
it all.
touch.
I can see the outline of cream ivory soft
home.

I sit down.
and run my hands lightly over the silentious expanse;
making sure all 88 are there,
all accounted for
all prepared to take on my unburdening.
then it begins: I start to play thru the thickness; in the color of night; in the
absence of the Sun.
my fingers
my heart
not needing the light to feel my way
through.

no one ever came to stop me. maybe they listened.
maybe they never heard my pain.
but I played, and I forgot I was there, forgot I was in the dark always, every
day, every night, and I let my fingers lead.
first: I would play from the heart, letting melody and sound rise like invisible
smoke

just pouring
out.

in time, my lungs breathe deep: it’s shallow trough abandoned for the
moment.
I play classical.
play the way he taught me: mumbled “ahhh…’s” and “hmmmm’s” and the
gentle sway of body on hard bench.
my spine has always stayed straight when I played; straight like rules, like hard
corners, like sharp teeth and consistent words. like a healthy soul. I could fake
a soul.

I watch. have beautiful hands, they seem small, but stretch far; an octave and
two notes, on a good day. a ten note span for a lost little girl.

breathe and move on. have to warm up the silence in the room first, for I’m
intruding on sleeping angels, or a napping God who won’t be pleased to see it
is me if I awake Him. so tenderly, a Nocturne, a hymnnnnmmmmmmmmmmmmm or
two.
and then…and then:

Mozart’s Sonata in C Minor! Can you hear it?
Dum, Da Dum DA DUMmm DUMm. DUMMMMMM! DA DUM DA
DUMMM DUMm!!!!

and all quiet air would scatter, and I bent the particles like a damaged soul, renting and wanting and ripping holes in the most unbreakable fabric: I was playing. loud, forgiving, unalterably powerful. and I would cry. gentle rocking with minor key sonatas, my hands a different entity than my mind – letting all the rocks and mudslides and metal beams and granite shards traverse down my tiny veins, cutting and bleeding from my mouth and neck, dripping and tearing through pounding heart and skin: flying away through my fingers upon an innocent ivory vista; flinging like broken promises and crazy dreams against the pews of the chapel, spattering like fluorescent finger pain on the seats and white walls, staining the Lord’s House with my misery!

I prayed and prayed and prayed He would understand, that this was the place I came to unburden, to shake my fist at the heavens and in the same moment kneel in utter anguish – just to feel anything from above, anything from anyone that wasn’t what I had endured already. breathe. again. again.

after Auschfung by Schumann, and the third movement of the Sonata in C Minor, my body is spent.
hands leave the bloodied keys to rest trembling on the bench,
remnants of exploded emotion still trailing
like lost streams down my legs. down three small steps,
where they puddle silently and stop moving like lost sheep;
absorb into the carpet and are gone.
the colors graffitied everywhere slowly lose vibrancy:
memory of my presence already disappearing.

it is thick again.

spine weakens, takes the shape of the letter C instead of rules;
winding staircase and inconsistency instead.
head bows. no one applauds.
gather up my grain-blue bag:
so heavy.
so h e a v y .
whisper apologies to deities I have offended.
beg forgiveness.
(curse them for their silence).

did you hear me sigh?

slide hands across the pews; they lead me blind thru halls
palm cold against the white stone.
and into the night.
thru thelittlewood (scary).
into the loud complex where my life is nothing.

back into a darkness
where there are no
keys for me
to play.

Keep reading…

Category: Stories From My Past

Comments

Leave a Reply





  • Recent Posts

  • Categories

  • Recent Comments

  • Archives

    • Get the button, share the love