Ruminations as America votes 2024

A jazz piano player ruminates poetically on the eve of an American Presidential Election...

Two hours tickling the plastics in a Swindon shopping mall known as Rats Alley. Slick renditions of Gershwin oozing from well oiled fingers, some beguiling violations of classical harmony prancing above a throbbing left hand. Surprising level of accuracy and creativity coming from the piano prof today.

Looks up for reaction from people flowing past. Not a sausinge!

Dead eyes drifting past fixed wistfully on unattainable consumer possibilities, unaware of the rich pallet of musical colours offered to their desensitised ears.

No response, Grommet!

Cheer up old chap. Fear no more the heat of sun, for you have done your work. By accident, the gods have transported you to the underworld where dead souls wander through avenues of consumer desirables, hungry ghosts unable to appreciate music with more than five harmonic regressions.

You have done your job well and may one day be returned to the world of musical colour, where eyes light up at a nice extension to a minor 7th or a subtle semi-tone shift of melody over a syncopated bass line…

For now keep plying your craft. Green shoots may grow even in this place where death has undone so many. Do not take the apathy of these ghosts personally for they have been frontally Abba-lotamised.

And while he broods in drowsy numb self-reflection,

What rough beast across the pond

Is moving its slow thighs towards the Whitehouse,

Called forth by mesmeric hosts of hungry ghosts

To be born into a Second Term?

(A prize if you can name all the literary/cultural references.)