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Marionettes

by
October 2021, no. 436

Marionettes

by
October 2021, no. 436

‘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.

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