Music to me is like days

Music has broken its frame
a bodice with busted laces
the entirely promiscuous art
pour out in public spaces
accompanying everything, the selections
of sex and war, the rejections.
To jeans-wearers in ripped sporrans
it transmits an ideal body
continuously as theirs age. Warrens
of plastic tiles and mesh throats
dispense this aural money
this sleek accountancy of notes
deep feeling adrift from its feelers
thought that means everything at once
like a shurgging of cream shoulders
like paintings hung on street mesh
sonore doom soneer illy chesh
they lost the off switch in my lifetime
the world reverberates with Muzak
and Prozac. As it doesn't with poe-zac
(I did meet a Miss Universe named Verstak).
Music to me is like days
I rarely catch who composed them
if one's sublime I think: God
my life-signs suspend. I nod
it's like both Stilton and cure
from one harpsichord hum:
pencillium -
then I miss the Kochel number.
I scarcely know whose performance
of a limpid autumn noon is superior
I gather timbre outranks rhumba.
I often can't tell days apart
they are the consumers, not me.
In my head collectables decay:
I've half heard every piece of music
the glorious big one with voice
the gleaming instrumental one, so choice
the hypnotic one like herbage at a party
and the muscular one out of farty
cars that goes Whudda Whudda
Whudda like the compound oil heart
of a warrior not of this planet.

Les Murray