I’m home for the easter holidays. Assignments are pilling up like mail at the front door and motivation is at an all time low. I’m suddenly way back into my music. Strange how procrastination can be such a motivator for anything but your work. It’s like I’m overcome with this desire to create sound, my pen has dried up and poetry is forgotten, but there’s something about this melody, something ringing in this one chord, I just can’t get enough.
They aren’t even catchy songs, they’re predictable and overdone, but I seem to be playing catch up with my past self; yearning for those days when band practice was twice a week and I’d play my instruments every day. I miss mixing passion with routine, now I’m too spontaneous. I’m writing poems on the train ride to Blackpool, getting two lines in then veering off the tracks, and I’m almost always humming. It’s like some strange sort of FOMO for my own hobbies, how dare I be too busy to write an unnecessarily long song. How dare I be too busy to play along with an album from start to finish. I purposely don’t listen to artists I like when I study for fear of getting too engrossed in the music. I haven’t drawn anything in ages too, I keep sketching the outlines, planning the colour schemes, falling at the last hurdle and filling my sketchbook with almost-ideas. Like a flip book of the process of losing interest.
Once my assignments are finished I’ll get right back to music and art. This isn’t some “woe is me, creativity is dead” mantra: I’m just busy and dramatic. I’ve been going to badminton once a week for a bit of fun while I miss all my friends, but I accidentally made new ones to miss. Everything i do lately feels so important, I’m trying to write a poem out of everything. Studying English has made me so pretentious.
This post reads more like a rant than anything else, but I haven’t uploaded in ages, and I needed something to do besides my work 🙂
Suspended
I wish I had stuck at piano.
to feel the riffs of those ivory keys hang in the air,
I wish I could re-notate my life
on the stave.
Crotchets and minims of time
well spent and worked for.
Now I half-heartedly pluck at strings,
weak attempts at the melodies of Davis and Coltrane,
wishing I could rehearse this life.
I used to be quick to say:
“I can’t live without music” and yet
music lives on, despite me.
I want to be held up like that.
An artist eternalised in their brush strokes,
their music, their words.
How is it that I can yearn so much but feel so unmotivated?
I don’t know, I never know.
I look out to the sky and feel such an overflow
only described by the romantic poets.
I want to be that oak standing tall
Holding up the sky.
I want flowers to burst from my ribcage,
flow in the wind and turn with the Earth.
I yearn to be a part of that world
which is as much mine as it isn’t.
