This is one poem that I remember exactly where I was when I created this five finger exercise. At the time, I was living in the reconverted garage underneath our house in Avalon. The advantage was I was out of the family's hair and they out of mine. I had spent the first 4 months of the year after I graduated learning guitar, spending perhaps 6 hours a day. My friend Ray commented many years latter how quickly I'd become proficient. At the time I didn't think so, having 3 or 4 very good guitarists to try and emulate. But I had learned to arpeggio pick, a skill learnt because I did not like the sound I was able to get out of strumming. So I actually sounded somewhat better than I really was.

I remember sitting on the bed, looking at my guitar propped up in the corner, in the mood to write something and thinking that writing about being a much better guitarist would be aspirational (wishful thinking-al). So that's where this one came from, describing moves some of which I could do and others that I would have liked mastery over. I've updated that first line from "Fingers balance gracefully" to "Fingers pirouette in balance" as a better description of what arpeggio picking is all about - all 5 fingers of the picking hand dance up over the 6 strings of the guitar in unity. So to some extent, every song I play using arpeggio picking is a "five finger exercise" too.

The poem wants to break into 2 verses of 8 lines (with a "bonus" line in the second.) That's because of the rhyme pattern A-B-C-D-A-B-C-D. While I'm happy to occasionally break a sentence and carry it on in the next verse if it seems to work, the poem resist this and has a unity that requires it to stay in one piece. It would be like breaking halfway through a verse in a song to play an instrumental - there are songs that do that successfully, but mostly it would just ruin the integrity of the writing. As the last line of the poem says "The unity of the song."