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 Seung Baek Seung is a distracted junior public servant. Occasionally a poem will occur to him and he will practice speaking it. Sometimes he will share it with others.

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written and performed by Seung Baek

This guy was so into the music
So with the music
That when the music stopped
He stopped

One time
The music stopped
And I don’t mean just paused a bit
I mean stopped
Everyone got their coats, packed their bags and left
Some lingered curiously to see how long the guy would
last
But this guy had sold his soul to music
He was wearing music’s ring on his third finger
And old fashioned kinda guy that he was, he took that
obligation seriously
So there was the room, silent in the late afternoon
gloom
And him, caught, mid-movement, mid-groove
The music had stopped and he had stopped with it
And he wouldn’t move again until the return of the
music

No-one there to see him
So maybe being seen wasn’t his motivation
But I don’t know what he really believed in

Did he really yearn for the return of the rhythm?
Maybe he did want to be seen
Maybe he wanted someone to come back and note the
depth of his commitment

Did he get tired?
Did he ever question music?

Well, the sun sucked back behind the window sill
And then the last rays sucked back out of the sky
A quiet moon struck a lone note through the window
His shadow was a statue

As the years passed, the roof fell in
Vines sprouting leaves twined round his limbs
Spiders webbed his hair
And birds raised families on his shoulders
His flesh fell away as the bricks of the room crumbled
And the acid rain burned holes through his bones as
his frame powdered onto the curling floorboards
It all sank into the dirt
The now-warped CD player too
Shards of disc inside still
Broken laser
Not even an angel’s finger traced across the tiny pits
would drag forth the sound
Now the body is no longer there to move
It was wedded to a moment in the future that can now
no longer happen
Time opened its mouth and swallowed the capsule whole
The capsule broke down in the acid of time’s gut
And was excreted into elements cast across the
massively curved sphere

Somewhere, you might say, he could reawaken in a
remembered form
Somewhere, the music might piece itself together again
from the broken elemental shards
Or maybe the essence of it always came from that
somewhere, and would express itself with greater
purity from that place, in the future
Somewhere beyond the waterfall of the horizon there
might be an infinite mountain of music playing all
sounds from all moments so that all bodies can move in
all ways
Always

But I have not yet seen such a thing
I can only say what I saw
I saw this guy stop when the music stopped
And wait for it to start up again