True Confessions

of an Imaginary

Child Star

“It’s gratifying that I can always

wake up before dying.”

                     ~In Praise of Dreams 

                                 by Wistawa Szymborska

Some days my aging feels like

watching Shirley Temple turn into

Humphrey Bogart in the mirror,

a magic act that I’m forced to enact

for reasons never made clear.

All this before one’s very eyes.

Only slowly and without the curls,

the broken promise that youth abides

to boys as vulnerable as girls.

“Here’s the floor

and there’s the steeple.

Open the door

and see all the people.”

Like Shirley, I too prayed by moonlight.

It’s an irrefutable fact.

Surely aging out of the business

 wasn’t meant to be our final act.

One night my thinking took a turn.

I grit my teeth and asked:

Which thought fills me with more concern?

The one that compares me

to a summer’s day, or the one

that re-jiggers my mask?

True, I’d spent the last 20 years

trying not to panic,

to keep my pretty little head intact;

to best save face and not get frantic.

Why should I look like a holy ruin

if I haven’t got a prayer?

Would they still love me

a wise old elder man

sitting cross-legged in the hills

far above the village

like a Gandhi without the frills?

What could he know 

about starlight dimmed

after so easily

curbing his every whim?

Lately my stem has begun

to grow stern.

My back seems always up,

what with all my bridges burned

and my innocence vaguely corrupt.

How could I not help but impose

my own unreasonable standards

on others as if all my lessons

were nothing but animal crackers!

Better I should sort a drawer

than dress down another neighbor,

let alone fans I’d once adored

who’d made me this shop-worn fable.

Won’t someone meet me 

on the stairs

and dance me back to the stars,

instead of climbing Jacob’s ladder

and ending up on Mars.

Plagued by constant sour thoughts.

Do you really think you’re not

all orphans in the end

the same as I in every teary story

I was ever in?

At one point I went to a medium

hoping for some sage advice.

Hatching my plan the moment

I heard her say:

“If you’re there…tap on the table twice.”

“Now I lay me down to sleep,

I pray the Lord my soul to keep.

If I should die before I wake

I pray my Lord my soul to take.”

And so I vow to wake myself up

by an itty bitty pinch to the thigh,

that way I’ll assure I won’t be cross

when I cross over to the other side.

“Row row row your boat

gently down the stream,

merrily merrily merrily merrily

Was life just a lovely dream?”

What better way to greet

the new morn than by tapping

my way back from the brink?

Not going gently into that good night

but with moves I learned with my feet.

May 11, 2021