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 H

Hand to mouth

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

Living with just enough resources to meet immediate basic needs, with no surplus or security.

Detailed Definition
This visceral idiom conveys precarious survival, economic fragility, or subsistence living. In poetry, it appears in social realism (Blake’s “London”), migrant narratives, or pandemic verse—highlighting systemic inequality. The bodily metaphor (hand feeding mouth) strips life to bare essentials, evoking dignity in struggle. Poets use it to critique capitalism or celebrate resilience, where daily existence becomes heroic. Its stark simplicity avoids sentimentality, grounding political messages in human scale—making hunger, not statistics, the focus of empathetic witness.
Example
Example in poetry:
Blake’s “London” depicts chimney sweeps living hand to mouth in industrial gloom; Migrant worker poem: “Seasonal crops pay hand to mouth—no savings, just survival”; Pandemic verse: “Gig economy: hand to mouth each week, feast or famine by algorithm”; Refugee camp: “Rations stretch hand to mouth—tomorrow’s meal a gamble”.
Additional Notes
This visceral idiom conveys precarious survival. In poetry, it appears in social realism (Blake’s “London”), migrant narratives, or pandemic verse—highlighting systemic inequality. The bodily metaphor (hand feeding mouth) strips life to bare essentials. Educators can use it to critique capitalism or celebrate resilience, where daily existence becomes heroic. Its stark simplicity avoids sentimentality, grounding political messages in human scale—making hunger, not statistics, the focus of empathetic witness in documentary-style poetry.
Also Known As
Live from hand to mouth
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