House Music

A poem that contains my burgeoning love for house music

Would move between speculative images of lovers

Dancing to beats akin to the beat of blood

Ticking in their neck

And the felt experience of inventing

A life in the home, house music, retreating

From the underground of Arkansas,

Which friends had come to associate as an origins for me

Till what I most feared came to pass

All my insecurities around speech and insight

Extending into life

If you die in the poem you die for real

House music, in my limited understanding,

Utilizes drum loops so that repetition becomes a kind of

Excuse to never leave the dance floor

I told my brother I was interested in learning what anger does

To the voice, but he didn’t return my message

House music rarely exploits

Rage for aesthetic effect unlike poets

Looking at you, Virgil

It is what I most fear coming to pass

To describe the poem you cannot write

Is a tradition, a synonym for cliché

Though the cadence is consistent,

And the voices repeat themselves,

In house music sounds often come from nowhere

Samples from the broader sonic underground

Y’all mind if a white boy speaks a little español tonight?

For instance, is too mainstream of a sample

Albeit altered from its original form

Better utilized in a mumble rap track, perhaps near

The beat switch, which was always my brother’s favorite

Slice of any song when we lived together,

Under the four-to-the-floor cadence of our childhood home

A voice that slurs without needing to be drunk or high

Another reason to listen to house music

My family never listened to it, though they are part of it

I’m interested in what anger might do to the voice

Anger being a kind of house music that can kill

If you die in the poem you die for real

Anyone caught singing on the record

Is doomed to repeat themselves, to be stretched

Into slurred, broken, unfinished vocals

A voice that repeats itself without moving on

Is called a stutter

A voice that slurs without being drunk or high

Is called a lisp

In this way my and my brother’s speech difficulties

Are what make us ideal speakers

For house music to pass through