Tourniquet

A ripple of notes, a wavering flame,
echoed in a gust of melody, is reclaimed.

A hushed, unweathered voice modulates
like light tethered by an emotional tourniquet

until the song spreads wings and skips
on time changes like glottal stops.

The volume dies, almost to a whisper,
syncopated drum containing the pressure

until low-tuned bass strings
crank up the volume

and everything explodes in a thunderstorm
of sound – I am transformed.

Kim M. Russell, 17th April 2024

On the seventeenth day of Na/GloPoWriMo, at NaPoWriMo we are writing poems inspired by a piece of music, which  share their titles with that piece of music. The examples given to inspire us are A. Van Jordan’s ‘Que Sera Sera’ and Adrian Matejka’s ‘Soave Sia Il Vento’. I rewrote a poem from April 2018 about a song I love by a British progressive metal band I love, Tesseract. You can listen to the track here.

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