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

Bios

Philosophy
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 culturally shaped form of life, distinguished from bare biological existence.

Detailed Definition
In poetry, bios concerns the ways a life becomes publicly legible through habits, rituals, language, and institutions. A lyric about migration, labor, illness, or mourning may show how bodily existence is organized into a socially recognized form. The term invites attention to both vulnerability and agency: a speaker inhabits inherited structures while improvising new practices within them. Poetic detail becomes evidence of how a life is made, governed, and remembered.
Example
Example in poetry:
Bios means lived or embodied life, so a poem can focus on breathing, labor, illness, hunger, and aging rather than treating life as an abstract idea; Walt Whitman’s catalogs celebrate bios by presenting bodies, occupations, sensations, and democratic intimacy; A poem about a nurse washing a patient’s hands represents bios through care enacted in physical detail; A lyric can contrast bios with mere biological survival by showing how memory, relation, and ritual make a life meaningful
Additional Notes
In ancient Greek thought, bios refers to a socially and culturally shaped way of living, unlike zoē, the fact of biological life itself. The distinction helps writers examine how institutions, customs, and political decisions organize human existence. A poem about a chosen vocation or public role may explore bios.
Also Known As
Life Mode of Life
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