Please turn the TV volume down.
Turn off the singers and their shows.
It’s too late for all that carrying on.
They sing crescendos. What I want to know is
what can they say about the long descent?
Where is a poet for the sloped plateaus?
There is no muse to guide the spent,
skipping tune you sometimes hear
from the aged, in their tales of discontent.
The linoleum is faded where
their steps have been paced and re-traced
til the leftover beat is thin and spare.
Some notes are gone now. Others spaced
wrongly – a new, blue variation.
Someday all of it gets erased.
I’ve heard that blue music on occasion.
It comes like radio waves, wavering
as if from a far-off, fading station.
-B Taylor, 2020