Please play with closed eyes
About ships that survive waves
Flags flutter Armada!
Battles cannons roar
Shooters shoot drift ashore
Wait wait what do they mean
But one measure after another
Images sail over times
Then and then people

Eyes open and hear nothing more.

I hear the piano playing softly
pulling me from these rutted plains
into a moist green meadow
a vision of a flowing brook down the hill
makes me believe the words of the Prophet:
“Your old men will dream dreams, your young men will see visions.”
yes, I am old, but I see and feel the rising gentle treble notes
lighten my leaded limbs
awaken my spirit
and ****** me into the realms.
It is the touch and glide of the pianist’s fingers
across the ivory skin of the keys
that transports me
in the waning hours of this day.
How sweet it is!

From the eleventh floor
the world looks small
and possible

The cars
     black and white
     parked perpendicular
          to the curb
     parallel
          to each other
are keys
     ebony and ivory
    
I reach out
through the window
and play the street like a piano

Arch your fingers, clasp your palm,
touch the keys as if pulling
at the heartstrings of a lover;
back in the looming financial crash of 2007
when a family bought a piano
and a new house,
and a young girl ached Chopin.

With your hand out of the window
and the car on the motorway,
talon hands, poised,
feel the air as a shotput;
smooth, round, permanent - oxygen bubbles
puppeteering pale fingertips
until the window goes up
and the radio is heard again.

Speaking three languages,
la mort, la mort, la mort;
D – E – A – D
the keys cannot spell ‘childhood’,
but her fingers reach
more than an octave now
(her thumb still ******).

Chopin welcomes her
to her final decomposition;
her piano, dusty
and blooming with flowers
through each key,
plays discords
that don’t quite make
a funeral march.