PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

I cannot shake the impression that wedding music of late

Seems such a transient thing;

I am more than faintly alarmed

By an overt abdication of tenderness,

By resistance to a not-too-distant era

When love songs expressed

Who can forget

How two hearts met.

Lately I’ve watched aesthetic derelicts

Jockey and push the tide of kitsch

Over the levies of restraint and elegance,

Swamping traces of acoustic nuance,

Fervently manipulating gadgets whose

Digital depravities swallow Kindergarten melodies,

Gulped down with deafening doggerel,

Far from any prophylactic against the feral.

What have we done with tenderness?

When began this aesthetic drought?

Whence emerged this great wave of factitious mimicry?

This push for insisting on outrageous decibels?

Early on even King Elvis romantiked us with “Love Me Tender,”

Which soon yielded gracelessly to “All Shook Up.”

Alas, life-denying digressions in dreadfulness

Offer doses of tainted gentleness.

Contagion is common while passing through aesthetic fog,

But the journey portends an arduous recovery.

At weddings I avoid the virus by drifting cautiously

On the fringe of the impenitent throng,

Lathered up and convulsive in a Gomorrah dance.

Plugged orifices barely mute the brimstone intensity;

A gathering of ear-washed sheep,

Lulled by a doomsday machine’s decibel creep.

The rabble scarcely notices one dismayed spectator,

One restless witness to the dense thicket of bodies,

Groping around, thrashing arms,

Hearts meeting breathlessly,

Intoxicatedly in touch with one another.

Do such lapses vitiate the permanence of nuptial union?

Indeed, can flailing arms forever open wide

To close her inside?

I’ve heard of a realm where unharnessed DJs fail to thrive,

Where vulgar gifts of the digital world are refused,

Where booming, windows-rattling, earsplitting tones

Represent a breach with no easy expiation,

Where singing about love thwarts the drought,

Where enduring spirits are less vexed by transient things

That masquerade as essence,

Before being called to due penance.

Perhaps I’m a remnant of some lesser species,

A race of people, who inhabit a fake world,

A nether milieu supporting defensive schemes,

By which one is obliged to become unhinged

Vis-à-vis barrenness and melodic depletion,

Where the Muse inspires subliminal coherence and

Enough tonality to repulse vacuity

And preserve a few leftovers of human dignity.

When the reaper carts me off,

He’ll sense that my struggle was a personal matter,

That I’m indifferent to dying a bit disoriented,

After my demon advised me to let the storm pass,

Departing, finally, a bit blasé over what perverse Muse

Moves callous mortals to sap song of its tenderness.

I’ll remain for now, lost in a sigh,

Clinging to a persistent fiction—oh my!