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 C

cement

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

Cement means to bind or fix things firmly together; in poetry, it can suggest the strengthening of connections, themes, or emotions within a work.

Detailed Definition
Literally, cement is a binding material used in construction. In poetry, it may be used metaphorically to describe what holds a poem’s parts in place or gives permanence to a relationship or idea. It appears in craft terminology because it evokes solidity, adhesion, and lasting form.
Example
Example in poetry:
A poet may use cement as a metaphor for something rigid and unchangeable, such as inherited belief; Urban poets often use cement imagery to evoke the harshness of city landscapes contrasted with nature; A poem about relationships might describe love that cements two people together permanently; Cementing a foundation can symbolize the establishment of identity or homeland in immigrant poetry; A poet could use cracked cement as an image of decay within seemingly solid institutions; In elegy, cement might represent the finality of a gravestone or memorial.
Additional Notes
Cement functions similarly to bind and fuse in craft discussions, but carries a more industrial and permanent connotation, often associated with modernity, urban landscapes, and irreversible change; poets use cementing imagery to suggest finality, whether in solidifying a relationship, a belief, or a memory, and the term can be productively contrasted with more organic binding metaphors like weaving or braiding, which suggest a more delicate or reversible connection; instructors might explore how cement's association with urban infrastructure makes it a natural metaphor in poems critiquing modern alienation or industrialization.
Also Known As
glue mortar bond adhere concrete
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