Love, in akchiis's «percussive function», turns up in the back room of effort rather than in any grand gesture. Judging by the mallet, the metal keys and the drumsticks, the speaker belongs to a percussion section, and the poem argues that love lives in the unglamorous labour of that life. It also argues that this love is circular. It begins with "those beheld" (people who are truly seen) and ends with the claim that "only through the loving of others / can one learn to love oneself, at all."
The poem is a single unbroken block of lowercase lines with no end rhyme and no regular metre. That suits its subject. Lines end mid-phrase, so that "the mallet" waits on the next line for "metal keys," and "with" is left dangling before the crammed, hyphenated "just-too-many-notes-and-rests to count." That compound is the most vivid piece of sound-play in the poem. It is breathless and overstuffed, and it makes the reader feel the page of music the speaker is squinting at. The opening verb may carry a quiet pun too: "love lies" means love resides, but "lies" is also close kin to "rests," the musician's word for silence, which appears a few lines later. Whether or not that is intended, the poem does ask us to find love in what is easily overlooked, and it says so directly: "it exists in the insignificant."
The images work through the senses, and none of them is glamorous. There is the "gentle grinding of the mallet," a sound, and the "incessant / rumbling of wood on the carpet," a heavier, more tiresome one. Then comes touch and sight: "glistening sweat beaded / on drumsticks," and "bleary-eyed / stares" at the scores. The "musty scent / of the paths walked by generations" adds smell and a sense of history. The speaker is one of many people who have trodden the same worn route. The "residue warmth and comfort" stays "dormant," like an ember that needs only the right moment to catch. Even the sounds are doubled in effect: "gentle grinding" and "incessant rumbling" rub against each other in the mouth as the objects do against their surfaces.
The grammar then breaks, and the break is the poem's turning point. The list of "in the…" phrases (in the scrapes and blisters, in the aching wrists and forearms) never reaches a verb. It collapses into "walking hand-in-sticks through the hellfire / suddenly makes me realise." The sentence changes its subject mid-flight, so the reader feels the realisation arrive before it is explained. "Hand-in-sticks" bends the familiar "hand-in-hand," swapping fingers for drumsticks and suggesting that companionship here is built through shared tools and shared pain. "Conjoining" does the same job: the blisters of different players join up. "Hellfire" is a large word for rehearsal, but it makes the strain feel enormous and the comfort that follows feel earned.
The ending moves from fire to dimness: "the places where the light is naught / and the shadows deepen its reach." Here "naught" is a slightly archaic word that makes the dark sound absolute. The only relief is "a glimmer of hope lay in that semicircle." The tense slips into the past ("lay") as though the speaker is looking back on a moment already gone. The semicircle is probably the arc in which the players sit, though that is an inference from the musical setting. It is an unfinished circle, and the poem's logic completes it: one person alone is a half-shape, and others make the rest. The last line has no full stop and ends on the faintly doubtful "at all," as if self-love were something the speaker did not expect to have.
The poem is significant for where it looks. It treats the back-row, equipment-dragging, wrist-aching side of music-making as a source of tenderness rather than complaint, and it does so without sentimentality, with sweat and blisters in the frame. Its title promises a "function," and the answer it gives is that a percussionist's job is not only to keep the beat but to show the speaker, and the reader, how to be held within a group.