What would your life be like without music?

Quiet.

Too quiet and sad.

To live is to make music.

To love is to hear music within others and you are hooked on their refrain.

To be love is to turn each other into instruments

And learn how to fill the room with glorious sound.

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A life without music means that I am alone.

That I don’t have a favorite musical to wake me up on weekdays;

That on the weekends that my father isn’t there with the Velvet Underground;

That my mother isn’t creating her own jaunty tune of good morning.

Nor that I can tell if my sibilings are home.

A life without music means the Hill is dead.

There is no low tone humming Rogers and Hammerstein,

That the Duke is ever silent, Gershwin a faded dream.

There are no bagpipes in the mist.

No garage band thrashing to life.

It is a hill hushed into silence as the winds enwrap it further into obscurity.

A life without music means that I cannot breathe,

That my mind is too frantic, heart too heavy

To move my pendulum from its stuck position.

For me, music is the lubricant of life.

It uplifts the burdened, emboldens the marginalized.

It soothes the frenzied, and humbles the audacious.

I cannot speak for others, but what you must understand,

Is that I, myself, cannot possibly move throughout life with out it.

Music gave me community when I did not know how to communicate.

It tethers me to family who are gone.

It links directly into my veins, exposing a heart

That flutters to life as the lights go down and mics click on.

I am a live wire, ready for a full possession and to be driven

To a state of divine bliss

That simply can not be replicated.

Not by words, not by drink or drug, not even a book.

Instead lie me down in a room with my headphones plugged in,

And leave me be long enough to flood myself with the CD of the day.

Drown me in the waters of music,

Release all other thought or want,

And allow that divine madness to raise me back up,

Back to feel the world around me right itself again.