‘For music is greater than our selves’
Göran Sonnevi, Mozart’s Third Brain

It’s our runaway imaginings that seduce us
away from the meanwhiler pleasures:
even as we cross each i, dot every t,
we calibrate our fantasies like rare treasures,
false memory-to-be. Our uses

of chronometry are genius, we can pedigree
our past, while Fate sits there gloating;
we snap screenshots of desire, safely saved
to hardened drives for storage, for uploading:
each temptation like a tune, the fee

exonerably nominal – so we stay behaved
by no benefit of doubt, every song
reminds us song’s not all: our selves hum,
sounder than any music. Yet we long
for a history more remote than real, shaved

from the present it was doomed to become,
future it couldn’t be – World was more serious
in black & white, just take the wartime
movietones, massed marches, those imperious
harangues, infected streets: the thrum

of a newsreel while we drowned in dark, the mime
of marionettes at century’s turn. That’s when
it can hit us, from some planet within, & fuses
briefly with the chyron of our days; then
is gone – supplanted by the next seductive rhyme.