Bass
Essays & Poems Series: on Bass and Pentimento; and Presence Over Performance.
Once in a rare cycle (blue moon logic) you encounter someone who renders all prior relationships rehearsal. Not in sentiment, but in structure. A workshop of survival logics, where two voices don’t harmonize; they collide. Not a duet. A mutual redesign.
One offers clarity, the other depth. One speaks in platform, the other listens with surgical precision, bypassing pretense, unlocking the vault. This isn’t passive connection; it’s analytic intimacy. One spills, pours, collapses into transparency. The other roams the palace of thought like a hawk, not as guest, but as builder.
Pentimento emerges, not just your layers, but theirs, revealed in the fold. The final mirror destabilizes: sound and silence blur, identity fractures. It’s the difference between performance and presence.
And then comes the moment when both recognize the twin image. Not fire twin. Not false soulmate. Something rarer. Because love didn’t bring you together. Physics did. Gravity. Magnetism. The manner of inevitability. That’s when she says “I think in another universe, we would be soulmates.” When you respond in unison, “actually we are, in this one.”
If you’ve found that person, the one who threads your logic, cracks your frame, and makes you feel the bass…this poem is for you. Enjoy the resonance. It holds.
Bass
I make you hear the music. But you… you make me feel the bass. I speak in structures, build in theory. You challenge, crack the frame, reshape each pace. You bring the soul, the weight, the pull, a balance rope I strain to tread. No monologue survives your presence: you give, you take, you forge, you thread. A filibuster worth stretching, just to sit inside the hush of your dark eyes: thought, depth, collision. Then silence. An open gate. I shrink beneath its grace, transparent, overwhelmed. You bypass pretense no knock, no key. Straight to the vault, locksmith in your certainty. I spill. I pour. No net can catch this avalanche of clarity. You roam my palace of thoughts not as a guest, but hawk-precise, methodical, catching every beat, every pulse. You play the bass. But sometimes I make you feel the tone. And when you sit back, watching the layers fold, what opens is pentimento: not just mine but yours, between. I speak in sound, you move in silence. A mirror now, and I’m unsure who I’m seeing through. I make you hear the music. But you… you make me feel the bass. And that… that makes all the difference.
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And yet there is also still remains that place between where the next logical/love move is still forming. You have written a wonderful expression
Lovely imagery. Stillness laced through the deep vibrato of bass. May this melody of tones and bass age like good port or fine whiskey, hold, and echo through your future.