even at the beginning
edge of memory,
she was here,
making absurd
through the observing:
siblings,
settings,
ill-fitting clothes of every era,
Polaroid snapshot gatherings,
grass and apple trees,
clubs and cliques and tube tops,
imagined crushes,
shameful invisibility.
Do you remember, she says, oh never mind,
we know together of
getting lost on purpose,
breaking down beside roads,
hating picnics for the trouble of it all,
or sucking the stuckness
of traffic jam hours –
inching inching inching
wanting to open the door and run away
leaving a car, a purse, a self behind?
Was she holding me in a
haze of ether,
as I was coming to and going out,
dreaming of awake, awake and dreaming?
Here’s the gift of all these years –
freedom has always been mine.
The prison of duty was self made, by listening to the song:
do as we wish and good things will come to you…
I knew a song so much better than that –
Her hum was that song
remember – not to forget
in the comic book, flip-through life –
of confusion.
How else would I know to change except through discomfort?
How else would I come to know that me is
one instrument, learning to play itself,
except for the sullied
fingers across my keys – the discordant disymphony?
I feel the ivory for myself;
I may play one note for the next 10 years
who gives a goodgoddamn, ain’t nothing but my own composition
and never was anything else at all –
a sound wave disappearing from the ears
only
to become truly seen.
The face in the back becomes the face in the fore –
a journey to the laughter
that I AM.
Life as Improv 
I enjoyed that 1!
perhaps only
a short hop
rather than
a high jump
and that self
will be cleared 🙂
a short hop and a helpful breeze at my back
Love your Basho replies!
“…clubs and cliques and tube tops,
imagined crushes,
shameful invisibility…”
Did you peek inside my soul, Miss Marga? I often recall days of youth as being ‘vacant’…like I had an enormous void inside. Frequenting places, in low slung clothes, charming the ill-meant graces of men. How we have grown!
Perhaps we do peek into each other’s souls at times – and perhaps what we thought was a void was so immense and connected, we would be blown away by the sheer power of it. I so wonder whether my daughters will experience such a void as this – for I can truly relate to your words here. Seems such a different time for them with more space to express the inner reality to listening ears. How we have grown!
You have ushered us into some place beautiful and vast. These words were like flowers thrown from a basket as the Self being Marga dashed past. It is hard not to be distracted by the flowers, to resist the urge to run out into the road and catch one before it hits the ground, only to discover when you catch it, it is disappearing, saying as it fades… “Peek-a-boo!”
Michael
You add so much with these words to me to my own experience, I am left wordless and smiling; such a visual, mysterious, delightful hide and seek game at dusk, as the dinner bell is calling us home!