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

Break even

Idiomatic Phrase
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

Break even: to reach a point of neither profit nor loss; while commercial in origin, the phrase serves poets exploring balance, justice, or the futile accounting of life's gains and costs.

Detailed Definition
Break even means to reach a point where gains and losses balance, with neither profit nor loss remaining. In poetry, the idiom can extend beyond finance into moral, emotional, or spiritual accounting: love may give as much pain as pleasure, or a life may be measured against sacrifice. It is useful for poems about fairness, trade, labour, debt, and compromise. A poet may use it to question whether human experience can ever truly balance, or whether some costs resist calculation.
Example
Example in poetry:
A poem about labour might say the farmer hopes only to break even by harvest; In a metaphorical lyric, love can break even when pain and joy balance out; The phrase suits poems about accounts, fairness, and survival; A satirical poet could use break even to show how little reward honest work receives.
Additional Notes
Break even comes from commerce and accounting, meaning neither gain nor loss. In poetry it can be used metaphorically for emotional, moral, or spiritual accounts: love, grief, labour, or sacrifice may fail to balance. The phrase is practical and prosaic, which can create useful contrast in lyric poems. It is especially effective when human experience is framed in the language of ledgers and debts.
Also Known As
Break even point neither profit nor loss
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