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

coded lyric

Genre
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

Poetry that uses veiled or symbolic language to convey messages accessible only to specific audiences

Detailed Definition
A coded lyric uses veiled language, symbolic imagery, or culturally specific references to convey meanings accessible only to a particular in-group, often for reasons of safety, identity affirmation, or subversion; common in queer, resistance, or diasporic poetry, this mode relies on double entendre, metaphor, and allusion to communicate layered messages beneath a surface of apparent conventionality or ambiguity.
Example
Example in poetry:
Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy,” where Nazi imagery encodes personal trauma and patriarchal oppression; Langston Hughes’s “Harlem,” using deferred dreams as coded commentary on racial injustice; Adrienne Rich’s “Diving into the Wreck,” using underwater exploration as metaphor for feminist self-discovery; Paul Celan’s “Death Fugue,” encoding Holocaust horror through musical and pastoral allusions
Additional Notes
Coded lyric uses veiled language, symbols, or allusions to convey messages that may be politically, socially, or personally sensitive; common in resistance poetry, queer verse, or works under censorship—decoding requires contextual knowledge.
Also Known As
Coded Song Encrypted Lyric Veiled Verse Subtextual Poem Code poem marker verse
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