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.

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

Don't hold your breath

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

Don't hold your breath: don't expect something to happen soon or at all; the physical impossibility of sustained breath-holding makes this a wry, understated expression of scepticism.

Detailed Definition
Don't hold your breath is an idiom of scepticism, meaning that the hoped-for event is unlikely to happen soon, if at all. In poetry, it can introduce irony, realism, disappointment, or a worldly voice that resists false consolation. Because breath is central to life, speech, and lyric rhythm, the phrase can carry more than casual dismissiveness: it may suggest withheld expectation, suffocated hope, or survival through lowered hopes. Poets can use it to undercut grand promises or expose weary experience.
Example
Example in poetry:
A sardonic poem might say, don't hold your breath, if you expect kings to apologise; In comic verse, don't hold your breath warns against unlikely promises; The phrase suits poems about scepticism, disappointment, and political realism; A poet could use it to undercut false hope with dry wit.
Additional Notes
Don’t hold your breath warns that something is unlikely to happen soon. The idiom turns expectation into a bodily impossibility: no one can wait indefinitely without breathing. In poetry it can express scepticism, disappointment, dry humour, or political distrust. It pairs well with imagery of lungs, silence, underwater waiting, promises, and delayed change.
Also Known As
unlikely soon
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