A quiet notice V2Melody closes at midnight on , Spanish time.

Closes

A note from Richard

V2Melody will close at midnight on 20 January 2028

This site has been a retirement project in musical poetry: poems chosen with care and set to music, offered freely for as long as it felt right to keep the garden open.

The work no longer holds the place it once did in my life. I have gone as far with it as I wish to go. Like a sand mandala, it was made to be completed and then released. I am not attached to its permanence, and I do not believe any of it needs to last beyond the time it was given. The poems were already here before I arrived and began to experiment with them. They will still be here when these musical experiments, and indeed myself, have been swept away, like the sand of a mandala. Nothing has been lost.

I want a simpler end to my life, days of simple love and enjoyment with my wonderful wife of 20 years. The work of maintaining a server, the monitoring, and the residual obligations that come with keeping a site alive no longer fit that life.

From 4 November 2026 I will not be adding new poems or musical poems to the site.

The experimental music I am making now is on my Suno profile. Those pieces stay there, and are not added to this site.

Until midnight on 20 January 2028, Spanish time, everything remains available exactly as it is. That is when my VPS server contract comes to an end, and it will not be renewed. After that, the server will be switched off and the site will disappear.

The Mandala Is Finished explains this more fully.

Thank you to anyone who found a poem, a track, or a quiet moment here.

The pleasure was in the making.

Richard

Home › Glossary › Letter A

abrade

Craft Terms
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

Want to hear it? Click the Listen button to hear the browser speak the word using text-to-speech!

The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

Abrade means to wear away by rubbing, scraping, or friction; in poetry, it can suggest roughening, erosion, or the slow effect of time on feeling or language.

Detailed Definition
In its literal sense, abrade refers to the physical wearing down of a surface through friction. In poetry, it appears as a craft term when a poet uses tactile or material imagery to evoke damage, pressure, or gradual change. It can also support metaphors of emotional abrasion, where experience wears at the self as rubbing wears stone or wood.
Example
Example in poetry:
Hopkins uses "abrade" imagery in sprung rhythm to suggest weathering and wearing away of surfaces; A poet might write of wind that abrades the cliff face over centuries to evoke slow erosion as metaphor for grief; In ecopoetry, abrasion describes how rock and sea meet, roughening what was once smooth; A confessional poet may use abrade to describe how memory wears at the edges of a remembered face; Poets describing industrial labor often use abrade to depict skin worn raw by tools or rope; A pastoral elegy might describe how time abrades a gravestone's inscription until it is illegible.
Additional Notes
Abrade derives from the Latin abradere, meaning to scrape off, and belongs to a family of craft terms that describe how surfaces are altered by contact and time, alongside erode, wear, and scour; poets use abrasion to suggest that meaning or feeling is not static but is gradually worn down through repeated exposure, making it a useful term for discussing poems about aging, grief, or environmental change; it pairs well with tactile and auditory imagery, since abrasion often implies both a physical sensation and a sound, such as grinding or rasping, which can shape a poem's sonic texture as much as its visual one.
Also Known As
sand scour grind polish wear down file
Skip to main content