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Discover Meekly: Let's Get Confessional
I listened to the first song, “Heartbeat in the Brain”, a lot in high school when I was going through an ugly, prolonged heartbreak, where the boy in question was straight and therefore painfully inaccessible. The song is pretty “edgy” and does feature some screaming, but part of it really resonated with me. I’d often play a 20-second clip over and over again while staring at the ceiling, high on angst and hormones.
The second verse builds up to this really difficult moment where the speaker is trying to hold onto someone that’s already gone: “I know a few chords that could make you miss me. / They ring and decay in this garage every few days. / Just trying to figure out this beat. / So if you want to come back east, then maybe you can help me find it.”
“But I want elegies while I’m still alive, I want rhapsodies though I’ve never seen Mount Olympus. I want ballads, I want ugly, grating sounds, I want repetition, I want white space, I want juxtaposition and metaphor and meditation and all caps and erasure and blank verse and sonnets and even center-aligned italicized poems that rhyme, and most of all — feelings.”
Yeah, the song is emotional, emo even. It makes me want to grow bangs that cover my eyes. It makes me want to smoke cigarettes behind GameStop. It makes me want to crack open an ice-cold Mountain Dew and dew a couple of kickflips. But it has a lot to say about letting go. I came back to it after breaking up with my partner and found that verse just as potent. It reminded me of a poem that a friend had shared, a short ekphrastic piece with its lines cut so short it reads wound up and breathless: “I hope / you won’t / need pills / like I / do.” The ending is also a sort of “come back east” invitation: “Please forget / your scarf / in my / life and / come back / later for / it.”
Rilke writes to the young poet Franz Kappus, “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
I am often so critical of high school Tom, who didn’t have all the tools he needed, didn’t have the fancy English classes to be able to explain his angst. His poems weren’t good. He didn’t have a confessional music blog. But god, I love him for trying anyways. I love him for asking questions with no / bad / ugly answers, but also the questions with so much joy, so much possibility in their blooming "?".