The root of love is not always love.
Love is not like music. Love is more complex.
Beethoven and Mozart weren’t good at it.
The musician stutters as he talks about his ex.
The music flows. Mozart is what the musician knows.
The return of the root tone
makes everyone, in the end, feel less alone,
makes melody more than what it is.
The coda, the cadenza, are certainly his.
The musician makes the claim for what he composed,
the root of the first chord returning again,
inside the hearts of those deep, passionate men
who laugh, embarrassed, when love is mentioned.
They can play music, remembering the note
which first made the right chord float
into the hearts of their listeners.
Music is easy, they say.
Easy, when lovers have gone away.
Concentrate on just a few notes,
the temperature of which is excited by a sluggish sound.
Strange hesitation by rapidity unbound.
The root of love could be a fortune waiting to be undone
by the passionate son.
The root of love could be hate.
Torture her by making her wait!
Let the lark and crow
comment on what your rivals know.
I had so many strategies
to make her love me.
D minor pianissimo worked for a while.
The A major of my vapid smile.
Her expectations will be met
with G minor seventh yet.
But I am being cute—as Mozart sometimes is with flute.
Not one of my strategies was like music—
but sloppy, helpless, weak, like love,
whose weakness may be the secret to passionate music,
but fails utterly, like everything, when all you want is love.