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 T

Thin ice

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

An idiomatic expression describing a precarious or risky situation where one must act with extreme caution to avoid disaster, likening the danger to walking on frozen water that might break.

Detailed Definition
Thin ice means a risky, precarious, or dangerous situation in which one wrong step may lead to trouble. In poetry, the idiom’s frozen surface suggests fragility disguised as support. It can describe social tension, forbidden love, political speech, financial danger, or emotional restraint. A poet may pair it with winter imagery to show beauty and peril together. The phrase is useful for suspense, especially when a speaker continues forward while knowing the ground beneath them may break.
Example
Example in poetry:
A winter poem might show children literally skating on thin ice above dark water; In a court poem, a reckless adviser walks on thin ice with every joke about the king; The phrase means being in a risky or dangerous situation; A poet can use it literally and figuratively.
Additional Notes
Thin ice means a risky or precarious situation in which one false step may lead to trouble. In poetry, it can be literal winter danger or metaphorical social, moral, emotional, or political risk. The image is vivid because the surface looks passable while danger lies beneath. Students should ask whether the speaker knows the risk or discovers it too late. It pairs well with cracks, cold, silence, dark water, and cautious movement.
Also Known As
risky
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