u/cappuccinolol17

KADOSHIN

This is a poem that tells the story of Kadoshin.
Kadoshin is a little bit like each and every one of us.
It lives on a planet not too different from ours,
in a time not too far away from now,
and it feels joy and sadness and pain and love just like we do.

There, the old clubs still smell like wet raincoats and beer,
amps humming softly before the first set begins,
and a young pianist still sits in the corner,
absentmindedly practicing his McCoy Tyner thing
with no one really listening or caring.
The band still plays for a while, stopping for drinks in-between sets,
and the clientele still politely applaud when it’s all said and done,
but eventually, they all must be on their way.
So they bid their new acquaintances goodbye,
and set off into the night.
They can’t stay forever, after all.

And that’s the thing nobody tells you enough anymore:
music was never supposed to “stay”.

I think Kadoshin forgot that.

In Kadoshin’s world, everything gets uploaded immediately,
compressed into thumbnails and timelines and metrics,
every song flattened into something permanent enough
to monetize, archive, replay forever until it dies
from overexposure.
But the best music I’ve ever heard
doesn’t exist anywhere now.
No recording. No shaky phone video, but no vinyl crackle either.
Nothing.
You had to be there.

A saxophonist once stood outside a diner at 2 AM
while snow pelted him sideways across the parking lot,
playing to absolutely nobody except the cook on break
and some exhausted waitress smoking by the dumpsters.
This was, professionally speaking, “the stuff”.
More about personality, the way it curled upward into the cold like breath,
bold and sassy, yet fragile enough to disappear if a car drove past too loudly.
And maybe he played even better because nobody was filming.
Maybe he let the music leave him completely
because he knew it wouldn’t survive the night anyway.
The best paycheck he could’ve got
was someone taking two precious seconds out of their day
to throw him a stray “Yeah, man!” after that hip line he just shedded.
He lived off the “woo”s and the blues, and he couldn’t have been happier.

That solo is gone now.
Gone forever.
The man is probably older now, or dead,
the diner maybe bulldozed into condominiums,
the snow melted away by morning.
But for, say, four minutes, the world opened up.
For those four minutes, something sacred manifested itself
and then disappeared.

Kadoshin.
The sacred instrument.
Not the horn.
Not the lungs pushing air through brass plumbing.
The soul.

My father used to sing obnoxiously while doing a goofy dance around the house,
scatting poorly remembered licks without names,
little scraps of songs dissolving into the sounds of computer keyboards clacking
and the patter of his profanity at receiving another stupid email from that damn associate dean.
Or my mother, who took classical lessons from a theatre actress
but still insisted on belting out the same two power ballads over and over again.
I never thought of it as music.
But sometimes I think those moments would matter more to Kadoshin
than entire stadium tours.
Because those moments were alive once and only once, just like us, their creators.
God allowed them to happen briefly
before the beast of mundanity swallowed them whole.
Genuine Kadoshin moments.

Here on Earth, a lot of people hate this idea, of course. Why wouldn’t they?
Ephemerality doesn’t sell very well.
The creators want permanence, in a sense.
But not long-windedness by any means, oh no.
Get it under thirty seconds, or you have thirty seconds to get the hell out.
Maybe a better way to put it would be…consistency.
Every chorus sharpened into a product sturdy enough
to survive endless replay.
They polish songs until nothing Kadoshin remains,
until every voice sounds vacuum-sealed,
until grief itself is presented, perfectly quantized to a 128 bpm grid,
sung into existence by a boy or girl whose voice barely needed to be there in the first place,
digitally stored as a “take” that will be distorted beyond recognition.
Can we really call that music? Kadoshin doesn’t think so.

I once saw a jazz trio in a room so small
the drummer had to angle his gorgeous Gretsch kit sideways against the wall
his tiny kick drum held in place by two sandbags to stop it from flying off the stage.
Maybe twenty people there.
Glasses clinking softly.
Some drunk hooligan laughing near the back.
And during the final song, the piano player stumbled
into this chord progression so heartbreakingly beautiful
that the whole room physically changed for a second.
I swear.
Even the bartender stopped wiping the counter.
Nobody spoke.
The bassist looked up from his instrument slowly,
like even he couldn’t believe where the music had led him.

And then it passed.

That exact sequence of notes,
those exact imperfections in timing,
the way the rivets of the ride cymbal shimmered
underneath that final major seven sharp eleven chord,
the strange heaviness in the room afterward…
all of it vanished immediately into the air.

But maybe that’s why it hurt so much.
Maybe permanence would’ve cheapened it.

And maybe Kadoshin appreciates what it’s given more
when it knows it will soon come to an end.

The ocean doesn’t preserve its waves.
Sunsets don’t repeat themselves exactly.
And Kadoshin voices still hurt each other,
still sow division, still selfishly beg for attention…
but never in the same way twice.
Music was never meant to sit still indefinitely.
Because that’s not what Kadoshin does, either.
Kadoshin breathes, then dies.
Sometimes Kadoshin might breathe for a good long while,
but only for a while.

Kadoshin lives inside the unrepeatable moment.
Inside the terrible knowledge
that the greatest thing you will ever hear
might happen once in a room full of strangers,
at 9:17pm on a Taco Tuesday,
in a nondescript town somewhere,
that prides itself on its fish and chips…
and never happen again.

And years later, you’ll still be trying to explain it.
Even on the slim off-chance you stumble upon a YouTube clip
with less views than there were people in that room,
the recording wouldn’t have captured it anyway.
It was the rain against the gutters.
It was the exhaustion in everyone’s faces after their long work day.
It was the way the singer closed her eyes
during the final verse, looking like she was saying goodbye
to somebody she’d never see again.
It was being there.

That was “the stuff”.
Not the notes.
Their disappearance.
The journey.
The soul.

Kadoshin.

Kadoshin

This is a poem that tells the story of Kadoshin.
Kadoshin is a little bit like each and every one of us.
It lives on a planet not too different from ours,
in a time not too far away from now,
and it feels joy and sadness and pain and love just like we do.

There, the old clubs still smell like wet raincoats and beer,
amps humming softly before the first set begins,
and a young pianist still sits in the corner,
absentmindedly practicing his McCoy Tyner thing
with no one really listening or caring.
The band still plays for a while, stopping for drinks in-between sets,
and the clientele still politely applaud when it’s all said and done,
but eventually, they all must be on their way.
So they bid their new acquaintances goodbye,
and set off into the night.
They can’t stay forever, after all.

And that’s the thing nobody tells you enough anymore:
music was never supposed to “stay”.

I think Kadoshin forgot that.

In Kadoshin’s world, everything gets uploaded immediately,
compressed into thumbnails and timelines and metrics,
every song flattened into something permanent enough
to monetize, archive, replay forever until it dies
from overexposure.
But the best music I’ve ever heard
doesn’t exist anywhere now.
No recording. No shaky phone video, but no vinyl crackle either.
Nothing.
You had to be there.

A saxophonist once stood outside a diner at 2 AM
while snow pelted him sideways across the parking lot,
playing to absolutely nobody except the cook on break
and some exhausted waitress smoking by the dumpsters.
This was, professionally speaking, “the stuff”.
It was more about sound than the notes themselves,
more about personality, the way it curled upward into the cold like breath,
bold and sassy, yet fragile enough to disappear if a car drove past too loudly.
And maybe he played even better because nobody was filming.
Maybe he let the music leave him completely
because he knew it wouldn’t survive the night anyway.
The best paycheck he could’ve got
was a someone taking two precious seconds out of their day
to throw him a stray “Yeah, man!” after that hip line he just shedded.
He lived off the “woo”s and the blues, and he couldn’t have been happier.

That solo is gone now.
Gone forever.
The man is probably older now, or dead,
the diner maybe bulldozed into condominiums,
the snow melted away by morning.
But for, say, four minutes, the world opened up.
For those four minutes, something sacred manifested itself
and then disappeared.

Kadoshin.
The sacred instrument.
Not the horn.
Not the lungs pushing air through brass plumbing.
The soul.

My father used to sing obnoxiously while doing a goofy dance around the house,
scatting poorly remembered licks without names,
little scraps of songs dissolving into the sounds of computer keyboards clacking
and the patter of his profanity at receiving another stupid email from that damn associate dean.
Or my mother, who took classical lessons from a theatre actress
but still insisted on belting out the same two power ballads over and over again.
I never thought of it as music.
But sometimes I think those moments would matter more to Kadoshin
than entire stadium tours.
Because those moments were alive once and only once, just like us, their creators…
because nobody can replicate them exactly.
Because God allowed them to happen briefly
before the black hole of mundanity sucked them back in on themselves.

And isn’t that what music actually is?
Not an object.
Not “content”.
Not files sitting motionless on sketchy servers somewhere.
A true Kadoshin moment.

The industry hates this idea, of course. Why wouldn’t they?
Ephemerality doesn’t sell very well.
Executives want permanence.
But not long-windedness by any means, oh no.
Get it under thirty seconds, or you have thirty seconds to get the hell out. Your pick.
Algorithms want consistency.
Every chorus sharpened into a product sturdy enough
to survive endless replay.
They polish songs until nothing Kadoshin remains,
until every voice sounds vacuum-sealed,
until grief itself is presented, perfectly quantized to a 128 bpm grid,
sung by some girl who sounds like she just got pulled out of the local high school
to record a “take” that won’t really matter because everything is edited within an inch of its life anyway.

And people still call it music
because dayummm ts hits different. Fire emoji.

But I’m telling you,
somewhere along the line Kadoshin started getting confused.
They lost sight of what mattered in the end.

I once saw a jazz trio in a room so small
the drummer had to angle his gorgeous Gretsch kit sideways against the wall
his tiny kick drum held in place by two sandbags to stop it from flying off the stage.
Maybe twenty people there.
Glasses clinking softly.
Some drunk hooligan laughing near the back.
And during the final song the piano player stumbled
into this chord progression so heartbreakingly beautiful
that the whole room physically changed for a second.
I swear.
Even the bartender stopped wiping the counter.
Nobody spoke.
The bassist looked up from his instrument slowly,
like even he couldn’t believe where the music had gone.

And then it passed.

That exact sequence of notes,
those exact imperfections in timing,
the way the rivets of the ride cymbal shimmered underneath that final major seven sharp eleven chord,
the strange heaviness in the room afterward…
all of it vanished immediately into the air.

But maybe that’s why it hurt so much.
Maybe permanence would’ve cheapened it.

And maybe Kadoshin appreciates what it's given more
when it knows it will soon come to an end.

The ocean doesn’t preserve its waves.
Sunsets don’t repeat themselves exactly.
And Kadoshin voices are eternally caught in the loop of hurting feelings,
sowing division, seeking attention…
but never in the same way twice.
Music was never meant to sit still, vacantly, indefinitely.
Because that’s not what Kadoshin does, either.
Kadoshin breathes, then dies.
Sometimes Kadoshin might breathe for a good long while,
but only for a while.

Kadoshin lives inside that fragility.
Inside the unrepeatable moment.
Inside the terrible knowledge
that the greatest thing you will ever hear
might happen once in a room full of strangers,
at 9:17pm on a Taco Tuesday,
in a nondescript town somewhere,
that prides itself on its fish and chips…
and never happen again.

And years later, you’ll still be trying to explain it.
Even on the slim off-chance you stumble upon a YouTube clip
with less views than there were people in that room,
the recording wouldn’t have captured it anyway.
It was the rain against the windows.
It was the exhaustion in everyone’s faces after their long work day.
It was the way the singer closed her eyes
during the final verse, looking like she was saying goodbye
to somebody she’d never see again.
It was being there.

That was “the stuff”.

Not the notes themselves.
Their disappearance.
The journey.
The soul.
Kadoshin.

___

https://www.reddit.com/r/OCPoetry/comments/1tdbj6g/comment/olvgm57/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

https://www.reddit.com/r/OCPoetry/comments/1tdcnb6/comment/olvgx6d/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

I heard Jesus Molina play a cover of this at a recording of a live show. I know it could be a live-only song of his own, but it sounds like it could be a cover, especially as he plays a lot of pop covers in Spanish at his live shows.