All the Musicians in Eisenach Who Were Not Born Bach

I can see a light on at six thirty in the morning on Sunday

in the window of a room on the sixth and top floor of the building

across Karlsplatz kitty corner from Saint Nicolas church

and I think someone has been burning the midnight oil

scribbling notes on a page while running out of ink

as I am listening to Maysville on repeat and feeling

the stabbing itch to learn the damn devilish tune that I let haunt

my ears and my now calloused fiddle fingers and this drive to play

really starts burning inside of me like a candle that keeps me up

in the middle of the collapse of music under the dark blanket

of Apple and Spotify and techno and AI that is coming for us all

and to say I have this drive to really sit down and play

like Bach would be false because for him it wasn’t a choice

and he didn’t have to think about whether he would be famous

one day like all the other musicians and poets around him

who sat around scribbling with barely anything in their mouth except jealously

patting their virtuosic friend on the back and salivating

but to play is to play and to think about fame and notoriety

and to want it is not to play and is to give up fame and notoriety

and to live a life of desire

which is no life of contentment at all but instead a life of torture

and musical masochism and jealousy and then the notes empty

and sheets become holed like Swiss cheese or the punches of gun shots

yesterday hiking from high up Wartburg castle down

into the forest and then into Dragon’s Gorge looking around

for wet blooming mushrooms popping up from the ground

through the fallen leaves

wondering how some living things take nutrients

from seemingly untenable and harsh conditions and grow

while other seedlings or fledglings around them fail

and become buried even before they lived a day

under the blanket of winter

all those unseen and unheard and nameless and forgotten

poets and musicians and painters and artists of today

and there is one of them in the attic of the Hotel Thuringer Hof

across the plaza who is just going to sleep as I am waking up

and grabbing at my fiddle even if not physically

like a prisoner playing an instrument in his head