Symphony: 3rd - Stunned

Nymphly Syzygy</b>

First Violins: (The love that dare not not speak its name).
Thunder and darkness,
As sudden as a moment’s comfort,
Have thy will, shy mutual flame,
I saw it.
Second Violins: Unasked, unasked,
The lines were made
‘Tween eye and eye,
I and thee,
Engross’d and lost in this nymphly syzygy.

Pianoforte, First Violins, Second Violins, Violas: (The love that dare not leave its name unspoken,
This love so precious, potentate in that I am thine).
The conjunction above the overcome moon,
Caelus, Saturnus, Tellus,
Trapped in godly syzygy
Fain whisper in mine ear this lyric:
She that thou dost
Meet in instants when all that is other
Is a world apart
And yet do not realise any further meaning
Flutes: For thou hast a private jest
See, this morrow, those days are yest,
Whereupon thou shalt, had thou not have guessed,
Take weeks to mull,
And only by intercession delivered
From resistance proffered
Against that which might only be feared in being known.

First Violins, Violas, Violoncellos, Flutes: (The love that dare not hold its tongue, let its name be heard,
But pads around with unearthly stealth,
As a nymph that may not wake the man).
Such deeds must needs have grand consequence
To this wide-eyed astronomer, whom hence
Directs his gaze with pain-bought innocence,
Upon thou nymph whom is my ambit, thence.

Flutes, French Horns, Clarinets, Violas, Violoncellos, Double Basses: (The love that dare not leave unanswered the question,
Huddles in an alcove, stone and glass,
Upon the knees of imploring
Arises to face the flawless countenance of the nymph).
Venus, Mercury, Earth, The Sun,
All set forth in alignment celestial,
They hold no power o’er me
That cannot be better expressed in thee
For thou art dreamscape, I revel in ye,
That I might know thy name.
Thy tongue might rightly be called argent
By praises sprung without invocation of the muse
Thou art the inspiration, thyself, my regent,
And it is your munificence I seek that might refuse.

Pianoforte:
(The love that dare not not speak its name,
Whose being is pure, whose absence shame,
Has staked its life upon a pirate’s chance,
To ask thy hand, to ask to dance,
I promise thee love, without relent,
Until unto the vales of shadow our communion is sent).
Repudiated not, I stand rejoicing
In the manner of thy choice
Know I not the route our fate must travel
But simply wonder at thy voice.
I dared, and did,
And met thy beam,
Shining visage of a greater syzygy
A higher balance
Whose name, unabashed and remorseless,
Is my love.

All this talk reminds me… (Romance is succinct)</b>

Piccolos, Oboes, Double Basses: So hard to remember what I was trying to convey,
Except that the world is sick,
Sick!
So kiss me quick,
Kiss me, you're beautiful −
These are truly the last days.
Oboes, Second Violins: But those are his words, not mine,
Even if they became the expression of my love’s genesis.
Oboes, French Horns, Second Violins: We shall stand,
Back to back and face to face
Saying in a duet
To bullets and to death
‘Is that all you’ve got?’

Piccolos: Because I love you,
And together; the world abhors
An interruption of its occluded midnight
‘I love you, you are beautiful, I will never let you go.’
The universe itself revolves around us
As we… kiss…
Our eyes open, quietly examining their counterpart iris,
Our hearts leapt in a place that has no gravity,
We are metaphysical.
‘I love you. Kiss me.’

The helicopter fell as into a lover’s arms</b>

Single Oboe: That night,
All of the power went off,
Combustion stopped working
Mechanism fell apart.

Single Viola, Oboes: Upon that night,
Where I found the union of love,
Flowing connected from our heart-to-heart
The city erupted in unlit riots,
And the helicopter fell as into a lover’s arms.

I Thought I’d Tell Them Everything I Keep Telling Myself</b>

The Conductor: There’s an incident
And you’ll hear it later
Which is poetic when I’d abandoned poetry;
Seeking around for another way to say beautiful,
Speaking of you, to you
My sister turned to me, the wordsmith
And I supplied ‘incandescent’
(More shall follow).

The Composer: No, that’s not what I wanted!
Tell them how you feel,
Because I’ve heard it and it has an essence of its own.

The Conductor: To her?
Of her?
I start only at the beginning,
To say that the beautiful are rare
When sought with these eyes
And the former de facto ‘most beautiful’
Is thinner than white darkness
Drained by means of you
Means and will.
I’ll be plain:
I shall never call you beautiful,
I will call you Beauty
For all others must come to you
Wellspring
To receive the status of beautiful.
You are pure beauty, beauty absolute, the source that beautifies.

The Composer: This won’t do, though it’s closer.
You are mystery and mischief
Without a shade of malevolence
When I am with you I am calm
Safe, peerlessly safe,
And passionate
To love you is a whirlwind and a solid rock.

The Conductor: There has not been a day, Delight, that I have not delighted in knowing that it is you that I love,
I want plain words and magnificent words to say ‘I love you,’ that tripartite elegance,
Where you and I are caught up in love.

The Composer: Inescapable wind,
You, True Beauty,
Carry along with you all that surround,
The strongest rapid −
I don’t hold on because I can’t hold on,
I’m swept away in you.

The Conductor: I had forgotten what it meant to be inspired.
Even without romance, you make my heart sing, keenly.

The Composer: Do you remember every off-hand remark?
(I almost know that you do)
Save for you, that is how it indeed is,
But for you:
The fractured fragments of a dystrophied heart were set to beating by everything you are.

The Conductor: There’s a smile on my face that isn’t forced and cannot be erased.

The Conductor: There’s a dozen futures that don’t exist without you in them.
It’s been said of me that I don’t see the mundane,
I see patterns, colour, light,
Perhaps that I find Beauty
But they have only said when I’ve spoken of you
The secret is, I have found Beauty.

The Composer: You are the path that is the functional enactment of redemption.
You are sex without lust, obsession without idolisation, you are love without fear.

The Conductor: You are many names and one.

The Composer: You,
This romance,
Make the cold cry
Meltwater rivulet tears.
Another conversation,
Where plaintiff complains
That you are only beautiful in fake make-up
Malproportioned
Such as cannot be ignored
And I say
‘The exact opposite. I don’t see any of that. I just see… she as she is is more beautiful.’

The Conductor: I cannot conclude
Give me four, eight lines
Complete, straightforward,
Captivating, beautiful.

The Composer: When I breathe, I breathe you, because you are the air and the light and the dust…
You have taken away all of my pretence.
You are more than I imagine you, even as I extol you.
I have old words, they are paper, they are speech, they are forever,
This is us.
Let us then be entangled, let us now be entangled.
I will always hurry to your door and we shall run straight into the storm.
Always.
Your soft burnished maelstrom: I’m your willing lover to the untarnished dance.

Drained, Blue is My Only Colour. Powerless, For You Alone Can I Enact.</b>

Piccolos: Around me there is a torus of rain
I, or my heart external to myself ,
Have turned drear
Into a hurricane
First Violins (pizzicato), Piccolos: Where the eye of the storm
The perfect blue where I see my spine laid out
Second Violins, Clarinets: I know that I could not have done this
Weakness is my bedfellow
Inability my only pretence at adequacy
First Violins, Second Violins, Trumpets, French Horns, Oboes: No, this is the work of Love.

Single Oboe: I was greyscale
Not beautiful like the final film photographs
Invoking no nostalgia
As the old television set might
Oboes, Bassoons: I was Britain never made lush by the rain
I was Dostoevsky’s San Francisco
My days were newsprint
Without reports of note
French Horns, Violoncellos, Harp: See me now,
Watch my buoyant smile
Part the clear sun-met sky

Trombones, Flutes, Piccolos: We are on the brink of the halo
The borderlands of one or the other
When I was always hinterland
Flutes, Clarinets, Violas: Cowardly, indecisive, easily led
My will this time is plain
Clarinets, Cor Anglais, Violas, Violoncellos, Harp: Let us be,
Let us walk through these gardens together.

Stunned; Musical Catharsis Does Not Quell the Roaring Numbness</i>

Single Trumpet: I had expected to be catastrophically destroyed
That a flare of excelsian sunflame would put apart
My convocation of matter, so idly and ungently bound
Single Trumpet, Single Clarinet: It is almost captivating how each one of my expectations
Not only made me unready
But served to lead me here
To self-deconstruct, by their existence make what they herald fall.
Trumpets, Clarinets, Double Basses: Only the unprophesied may come to pass.

Second Violins, Clarinets, Trombones, Cor Anglais: Now stunned,
Always caught off-guard by you
For I could never hold up a hand to keep you out
Second Violins, Flutes: That is why it frustrates all the more
That you are departed and not gone
From the deep truth of me
Second Violins, Violoncellos: Even as you never knew it,
So needlessly hidden –
I had nothing to fear and everything to lose
Yet what truth does now is propagate a fantasy
Oboes, Trumpets: I stumble,
Stunned,
Because the ache of seeing you put pay
To the simple tucentric hopes
That I practically forgot to impart
Oboes, Clarinets, Trumpets, Trombones, Violoncellos: Is altogether not a mortal hammerblow
Enough to add up with my interminable soul-mathematics
When I look at you and know
Equally, it is so much, so foolishly overblown,
To mourn, to fugue like this,
To become riven so definitively from myself, and from you,
Because of a handful of might-have-beens
When I face the reality of suffering every day,
Distal or proximal, each more real,
I’m confused, stunned.

First Violins, Violas, Tubas, Bassoons: The past slinks back in
The seductive assassin
That is the greatest crisis,
The shapeless well-known horror
Standing at the bridge,
He, I, identities all intermingle on the one side of selfhood
They try and stop past and present meeting, fusing
Becoming archetypes of anything but beauty
First Violins, Violas, Violoncellos, Trumpets, Trombones, French Horns, Tubas: The struggle is sapping only because it is the same
It took years to learn lessons
To be trained under a mentor
Exquisite and excruciating
Rich, bodacious in what the modern mind titles melodrama yet knows is truly feeling
An antidote to the empty barrow of over-exposed photographic repetition.
A stern mistress, whose many face even now say
Timpani, Violas (pizzicato), Trombones, Bassoons: There is no Industrious Lady
There is the Bourgeois and the Proletariat,
The Past and the Present,
The One and the Renaissance
Accept the moment as the call
Instead of the falling-to-sleep of the virtuous Byron
Words, become truths.
Intentions, become reasons
That join love and thought and objective (driven and perceived) action.

Single Flute: There was a deep place within where I could go, and think of you
Hear the furnace-banner of your voice speak words
I long to hear
Where
A place exclusive of all save skeletal chapel, kneeling silent nave,
Where I could feel,
I could rise
Lifted to the silver skies
Single Violoncello: Your voice, not a cello but human, full and flawless.
Now I find the door to that well is locked
The undermental sanctuary barred to my access
As I circle all around
Trying to find a new entrance
Pain has raised me away
Even as I felt keenly
I lost the heart to break
Just as you walked in, so you slowly stepped out
Not beyond love, with no malice, feeling regret, mayhaps simply fear,
‘I love you all the same’
Same as ever,
But I can’t see your face,
Hold close your being,
Be mindful with you present in secret
I’ve lost you whilst you still are
This disfiguring scar is just the prelude to realising:
Last time, it was completely thus.

I Would</b>

Reel-to-reel Tape, played at 78% speed: All I know is, on the day your plane was to leave, if I had the power, I would turn the winds around, roll in the fog, I would bring in storms, I would change the polarity of the earth so compasses couldn't work, so
your plane couldn't take off.

INCANDESCENT</b>

Full Orchestra, Double Complement: I HAVE NO FAIRYTALES LEFT
WHEN ALL I HAVE IS ALL I NEED
THE BLOSSOM-HONEY OF YOUR LOVE;
I AM CONTENT.

Full Orchestra, Double Complement: THE MAGNESIUM FLAME, YOU BURN −
INCANDESCENT, UNFADING BRIGHTNESS IMPOSSIBLE
SAVE FROM YOUR FACE,
I BASK IN ABSORBED GLORY.

Full Orchestra, Double Complement: OF YOUR OWN UNRESTRAINED BEAUTY,
YOU SHIMMER AND BEAM
ROSE CAMPION PETAL SKIN
I LOVE YOU, INCANDESCENCE.

Full Orchestra, Double Complement: NO CRESCENDO OF OUR LOVE
CAN EVER BE COMMITTED TO THE PAGE
TOO BRIGHT, TOO BEAUTIFUL;
BELOVED, MY WORLD, WE INCANDESCE.