Splice Box & Accompaniment

I replay the lick: Isaac Schankler’s rendition of Moon-
light Sonata. Outside, a sun shower. Machinations

of grief complicated further be-
cause it is a distortion of

something known, or something I once thought
familiar. Like mint or clover. Beethoven’s melody but

executed one bar earlier, bass simultaneously one bar
delayed—in effect creating a catastrophe

in the soul. Like a machine in the ghost, it’ll
be this morning’s obsession, a conversation re-

arranged, words acquiring interior meanings: Trace
(unreleased); Soundcloud; Silent Hill-ish. Creating static, combing

through air’s syntax, outside my window, bright
rain pinging against the tin picnic table. It’s as if

I’ve always heard this song’s inner workings unfolding, this
pacing. Of loss. Of sorrow. Like gears festering

at the bottom of a lake. I no longer want to
call this music song, peeling layers back as certain

flowers incrementally exposing seeds. As if one can stave
off grief. It’s milking stone, it’s gold insects what that chord does

inside my throat, here’s where it goes to Castlevania-land, I keep
looping, I keep dipping below surface, im getting spooked. At 5:26,

it begins. The notes tripping over themselves. At 6:11,
a knoll. Like a phone trilling

in the rain. I mean, when on street corners, you
could find phone booths. For a few coins

you could ring someone, maybe reach
them. Sometimes the time would run out.

The operator would disconnect you & you’d be left
talking into a receiver not knowing which words were

heard & which had already become dead air.
But I’m not ready to leave the doubling of, the

moments where the keys become Keatsian
to the touch—flesh made satellite, & so

before striking, striking,
the fingers recoil.