The Paradiddle of Being - Book Two: The Becoming
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The Paradiddle of Being — Book Two:
The Becoming
Daniel Henry Rodgers
"What we call disorder might only be an unfamiliar time signature.
Grace does not erase the rhythm of grief—it composes
around it for there comes a time when survival itself
must learn to dance. The hands remember what the heart
cannot say where pain becomes pattern,
and pattern becomes prayer."
- Poet
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Listen to poem:
VI.
We are all metric modulations
of our former selves—changing time signatures
mid-measure, learning to count
in odd meters when life refuses
to conform to 4/4 expectations
finding beauty in 7/8 existence—
the off-kilter cadence
of becoming.
The teenager tattoos pain across her skin
in sixteenth-note flurries—
razor crescendos marking flesh
rimshots echoing in a locked room
her body a snare absorbing
what no one will hear.
But the counselor reorients her strikes—
guides her hands to ghost notes
tapped on the edge of possibility
showing how silence can carry rhythm
how grief, redirected, becomes texture—
not erased
but transformed into syncopation.
Teaching her flamacue and ratamacue—
rudiments to rebuild rhythm
from fracture.
In meditation halls, the brush technique
of breath against awareness
sweeps circular patterns
across the snare drum of consciousness
each revolution revealing
the interdependence of all sounds—
how silence gives meaning to music
how emptiness gives shape
to form.
Even after forgetting—
we are the drum that cannot be silenced.
VII.
The mother with Alzheimer's forgets words
but remembers the shuffle rhythm
of her grandmother's feet
on kitchen linoleum forty years ago—
proving knowledge lives
deeper than language, that love
is stored in the muscle memory
of tempo, in the bone-deep knowing
of when to accent
when to rest.
The war veteran's PTSD manifests
as explosive snare hits in quiet moments—
his nervous system stuck in double-time
every car backfire a timpani roll
announcing danger that exists now
only in the echo chambers of trauma.
Slowly, therapy teaches him
to play his pain in slower tempos—
cross stick replacing gunfire’s crash cymbal,
finding the spaces between beats
where healing lives.
VIII.
The street musician's tabla bols
create community from strangers—
ta-ka-ta-ki-ta becomes the common language
that transcends the babel of urban isolation.
Each coin in his case a vote
for the radical proposition
that beauty matters more than efficiency—
that rhythm is prayer
accessible to all faiths
all doubts.
The autistic child constructs cathedrals
from polyrhythms—three against two
four against three—
tiny wrists parsing the paradox
of a world too loud to understand
yet perfectly timed beneath its chaos.
Each strike a syllable in a language
her flam paradiddle-diddle hands
dissecting chaos into latticework
unspoken but truer than speech.
Her fingers discovering order
in the latticework of syncopation
where logic and wonder
share the same downbeat.
She does not fidget—
she improvises.
She does not escape—
she listens deeper.
And in her palms
the world becomes percussion—
finally speaking in a dialect
her heart can follow.
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The Final Book 3 is coming.....
Copyright © Daniel Henry Rodgers | Year Posted 2025
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