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Troubadour

John E Marks
Dec 9, 2022

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https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/ebook/the-troubador

I still walk beside you: tall, stooped, a quintessentially English presence. Listen to how those flat northern vowels swirl into melodies, melded with the staccato RP of Cambridge.

So many minor key explorations of sadness; pulling at the scabs of my loneliness and regret. Your poems made plangent by the melancholic timbre of your voice. Your abiding mood irresolution, your secret power, regret.

You never lost your fragility of heart and my emptiness of soul was filled, at least passingly, by the gentle, observational lyrics that lifted your songs into poems. Poems that very soon broke my heart.

And that’s my mea culpa. I cannot listen to.your achingly beautiful music without admitting to myself, again, your poems’ terrifying, and abiding truth.

And since May 24th 2022 my soul has been torn by the suicide of my best friend Chris: classicist, poet, linguist.

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John E Marks
John E Marks

Written by John E Marks

Beauty is the only thing that time cannot harm. Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood. T. S. Eliot

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