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Tag: quintet

The Dancing Bells: quintilla

Published on June 19, 2025

The world seems so out of balance.
Perhaps it’s only me and mine.
Sometimes the music for the dance
makes every step a dotted line
with the next motion left to chance.

The world keeps spinning, just the same.
It doesn’t matter if the tune
is out of rhythm. Who’s to blame
when one foot shifts its weight too soon?
It’s just a dance. It’s just a game.

The world goes on and on in time,
while we are here a while, then gone,
just shadows, fading and sublime,
whether of queens, bishops, or pawns.
We dance on, while the bells still chime.

19 Jun 2025

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Outside the Cage: Sicilian quintet

Published on June 18, 2025

Physical confinement has its source
in some external entity that binds.
It is imposed by outside will, of course.
But slavery is not just of that kind;
your mind’s created prisons reinforce

the limitations you are taught to see,
the walls that form the edges of the box
in which you play out your brief history.
It has no doors or windows, and no locks,
but keeps what is outside a mystery.

It takes so little to remove the lid,
but once you’ve seen outside, your goose cooked.
You cannot take it back, and if you did,
there’s no way to describe what in one look
destroys all that you learned when still a kid.

Your chains you forge in life are your own brand.
The steel in them is alloyed from your acts.
There is no crushing heel or helping hand,
no unseen other twisting simple facts.
You are the ship, the ocean, and the land.

Inside the cage you build to hold you in,
there is just one sure way to be set free:
forget all that you know. Once you begin
to let that go, your eyes, now dull, will see,
and recognize exactly where you’ve been.

18 Jun 2025

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