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 D

Dead in the water

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

Completely halted, unable to progress, or with no chance of success; a situation with no viable path forward.

Detailed Definition
A nautical idiom describing a vessel without wind or power, this phrase captures the paralysis of stalled momentum. In poetry, it evokes creative blockage, political impasse, or the existential stillness that follows catastrophic loss. Poets deploy it in works about depression, institutional failure, or the aftermath of defeat, where forward motion has become impossible. Its water imagery connects individual stasis to elemental nature, suggesting that paralysis is not merely personal but environmental—a condition of the surrounding medium, not just the vessel. The phrase's finality gives it force in poems exploring endings, the extinction of hope, or the strange suspended state of waiting without expectation.
Example
Example in poetry:
A poem about a failed enterprise — a ship of ambition that sits dead in the water — might use the idiom to capture the particular despair of stalled momentum, the sails full but the vessel unmoving; In a political poem about a reform movement that has lost its energy, dead in the water describes not dramatic defeat but the quiet, more demoralizing experience of gradual stagnation; The nautical origin suits poems set at sea or near water, where the literal image of a becalmed vessel enriches the figurative sense of helplessness that the idiom describes; A poem about depression might use dead in the water to capture the specific quality of that paralysis — not energetic despair but the absence of forward motion, the will unable to move the vessel of the self; In a love poem about a relationship that has ceased to develop, dead in the water is the diagnosis that neither party wishes to speak aloud, the silence around it its own form of confirmation; The phrase suits poems about the creative life — the project that began with such momentum, now sitting dead in the water, the wind gone, the port unreachable, the return as impossible as the continuation
Additional Notes
This phrase has nautical stillness: a vessel unable to move. In poetry, it can describe a failed plan, stalled relationship, blocked journey, or exhausted life. It works especially well when contrasted with former motion: sails once filled, now slack. Related images include becalmed seas, broken engines, drift, harbour, silence, and ambition stranded before departure.
Also Known As
At a standstill Going nowhere
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