Two souls dancing in the night

This is Quantum Tango

Sometimes a poem is a song, a song is a poem and they can’t exist without one another. Did you want a poem or a song? Didn’t you sign up for poetry and art? Because I decided to give you music too this week. I wrote this poem several years ago, but only wrote a tune for it this week. I love to write music for my words, to place each syllable upon the stave, to polish them as ornaments and arrange them on their musical shelf.

Now that the poem has its place within a tune, I understand better what I was trying to say with it. I won’t tell you what that was though, because I want to give you the chance to make your own minds up about what it means. I want to make space for you in the poem and in the song, too.

We too commonly separate art forms. We must declare ourselves a poet, a painter, a writer, a musician, a fashion designer. Pick one. Society likes to make sense of creatives by choosing which discipline we want to remember and understand them for, but the closer you look at how art works, it rarely is restricted to one medium. David Bowie painted, Vivienne Westwood wrote philosophy, Maya Angelou danced.

But we think it works like that, that we can only be one thing. You know why? Perhaps because it’s easier to sell that way.

I say why choose one medium when you can have 20? I choose to be a Jacqueline of all trades, a mistress of the miscellaneous and a student of many art forms. In that way I get to grow outwards, catching surprises in the web spun by my creative actions. I never want to stay the same. Each time I try to chain myself to one form of expression, I seem to transmute into something else entirely. Trying to define creativity is like trying to hold the ocean.

So, be your own strange musical arrangement and see how courage takes you right back home to yourself.

This is Quantum Tango. And it is a love poem – because you definitely did sign up for that.

Enjoy!

Quantum Tango

Two souls dancing in the night

above two bodies                           misaligned

From the guts

fly through the air

and

stack

like

cups

filled with moonshine

Two souls spilling, spinning lights

one pair sleeping off the fight

While sweet ghosts play

Two licking flames

Two-stepping over leaden hosts

Engaged in gentle tango

Two particles entangled

Painting is Munch: The Dance of Life, 1899