The Music of What Remains

"In my beginning is my end" I. Between the silence and the sound, between the needle and the vein, I walk the circles, round and round, while frequencies rehearse my pain. What is music but time arrested? What is addiction but time's refrain? The song I thought that I had mastered plays me, again and again. In the subway tunnels of the mind where echoes multiply and fade, I listen for what I cannot find: the song before the song was made. II. April is the cruelest month, mixing memory with desire, Bach with need. The radio plays while I am fixing another dose of what makes me bleed. Shantih shantih shantih The peace that passeth understanding passes by my window daily while I practice the demanding scales of hunger, arpeggios of want. Do I dare disturb the universe of my own making? Do I dare to hunt for melody beyond this curse? III. Here, in this place where time folds back upon itself like sheet music torn, I am the white noise and the track, the singer and the song unborn. The cage is not what holds me here— the cage is what I have become. Each bar a measure, crystal clear, each space between a different drum. Listen: can you hear it? The music underneath the music, where addiction meets the spirit and the broken learn to use it? IV. We are the hollow men We are the stuffed men Leaning together, headphones filled with static. Our dried voices, when we sing together, are quiet and meaningless as wind in dry grass. But sometimes—sometimes in the space between the craving and the dose, between the fall and saving grace, I hear what nobody else knows: The sound of chains becoming wind chimes, the rhythm of a heart learning to rest, the harmony that slowly climbs from the ashes of what we've confessed. V. What we call the beginning is often the end And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from. In my end is my beginning: the song that teaches how to cease, the cage that opens by remaining, the music of what finds its peace. Little Gidding, 1942 August Laboratory, 2025 4 Aug 2025