(For: Nick Drake - 19 June 1948 – 25 November 1974)

 

 

I still walk beside you: tall, stooped, a quintessentially English presence. 
I listen to how your flat Fenland vowels 
swirl into melodies melded within the staccato RP of Cambridge.

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

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

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

There’s an end to love and an end to youth...