sketch by John Way circa 1952)
The Music Rooms
fr Days of Mercury
The Lustrous silence of emotion
lyricism defiled
to glorious feral
beats
to 16ths
damnation
fragments recline
Deep in another dream
visions of
Mercury’s flight to Delos
That burnout like a silent horror movie
but on this afternoon
we lay around waiting for
some guests
who said they might arrive,
but have no intention of letting them in
let us
escape now
He is
of Lustrous Emotions
O negative to my Oe’er negative
most campy vampirique
inked my body, then
I thought
the light in his body is
the neural charge
the eternal flame & afterburn
together composer=architect=composer
dreamers’dreamer dream
silent lovers
later
Keeping them out
slugging a bottle
‘52 Chateau Margaux
rabid laughing
drunks
in our madrigals
shadows disappear
on torsos
the dignity & valor
of our space and time
naked & immortalized
legato
I left him in bed
a pointed toe spooling the silk
sonata busted
inside glamour waiting on
an incessant
disbelieved fanfare,
a bare-knuckle battle for the lyre
He’s lit a cigarette without
even noticing
the phantom harp
in his bluesmoke
as notes slice over of architecture
of these rooms
He made these rooms bounce
universal seed sound to any whisper
He placed a Louis XIV bloodred divan
dead gods lurk under glass
so nothing else vaulted
In his gallery
sacred and profane
instruments from Nepal
the only other object in my
space, oh
the Steinway nuts and bolts
he will look in on me from his distant loft
after hours
swaying over our cliff
naked up there dreaming
bringing in a lyre
blue eyes
black hair over them
a piercing laughter
with his strum
silent hint of a
dance against time
a dance against time
beat conjured
then forgotten
He builds and I compose
& so on
For John Way
The Music Rooms is based on scene portraits of John’s lovers he painted in his NY loft in the early 50s