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 B

Beheading

Constraint
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

A poetic technique where the first letter or syllable of each word is systematically removed.

Detailed Definition
Beheading is a lexical constraint that involves truncating the initial letter or syllable of words throughout a poem, creating neologisms or altered meanings; this technique disrupts conventional diction to produce phonetic novelty, semantic ambiguity, or humorous distortion, often used in experimental or children’s poetry to foreground the materiality of language and explore how minimal changes can radically shift interpretation, echoing Oulipian interests in rule-based linguistic play.
Example
Example in poetry:
Beheading in poetry removes the first letter of each word: “Light” becomes “ight,” “Knight” becomes “ight”; a beheaded acrostic poem hides a new message in truncated words; Lewis Carroll’s puzzles include beheading games like “Headless words in rhyme”; in Oulipo, beheading transforms “stone” to “tone,” creating semantic shifts; beheaded sonnets where each line starts with a word minus its initial letter; children’s poetry uses beheading for riddles (“What’s left when you remove ‘b’ from ‘beetle’?”).
Additional Notes
Beheading is a wordplay constraint where the first letter of each word (or line) is removed, creating new words or nonsense (e.g., “stone” → “tone”). It’s common in Victorian parlor games and Oulipo exercises. Students can use it to explore semantic slippage or generate surreal imagery. Beheading pairs well with anagrams and spoonerisms. Caution: results may be trivial unless guided by thematic intent. It exemplifies how micro-constraints can yield macro-innovation.
Also Known As
Behead head removal (in wordplay)
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