The new cast list is up and
I got the role I wanted,
the fool.
Those who know better often shake their heads at me,
but really, if they had more facts, figures,
a made-for-tv version of my story,
they would really call me out.
I haven’t the right to walk on air!
This world might deem me dim,
but I remain oblivious –
walking off buildings,
onto steel beams,
lifted by cranes.
When the beams end,
I’m landing on clouds.
The radio plays songs
I didn’t appreciate
when I knew them when,
so I grin,
and dance in my seat on my way to detention.
What a joy to know
my mistakes bring us closer
to laughter –
and that is always the best place to meet
if there’s no longer anyone to embarrass.
Life as Improv 
BOOM!
shack – ah – lack- ah 🙂
I do so enjoy the nuance in your writing. The fresh discovery of old songs we didn’t like when… what a great indicator of the distance we have traveled. Those old songs are like mile markers along the trail. We just focus on one step, then the next, then the next, and then we hear the sounds drifting through the trees and find we are living from, and able to receive them from, a fresh place we have discovered. We have somewhere become someone new, and yet not different.
This linking of mistakes to laughter… our mistakes must hate that… to have their malignant gravity shrunken down to a benign punchline. Sometimes it takes me a while to get there, though… Rather than taking the wind out of them, I end up trying to compress and shrink them… and suddenly I’m trying to get 2,000 psi out of an old bike pump. A little bit of that goes a long way, and THEN the laughter arises from the ashes of winter like the blossoms of spring.
Michael
I often feel like I step into a generous landscape of reflection in your words – what a gifting! You give me insight into the messy finger painting part of me that doesn’t give much thought to understanding – and I begin to see designs in the abstract canvases she’s tossing up on the walls.
Dancing the “shuffle off to buffalo” step is a big ol’ pinprick to the balloon of mistake making seriousness – hope I can keep it going 🙂 I can really relate to pushing down hard on that bike pump handle at times. Joy to you in weekend spaciousness!
I had to do a double take on this one. I used the pinprick in a balloon analogy recently in some writing, but I don’t think it was on my blog. Maybe just not the outer one. 🙂
Keep it going! Happy Mother’s Day!
Michael