An Elaborate Game

 

(This spontaneous riff inspired by David Kirby’s poem “King of Good Fellows”)

Writing this week was a real challenge. I felt like I wasn't able to clearly formulate my thoughts, or I didn't have any thoughts at all to formulate and had to stretch for inspiration. It hasn't been that way all along, so it was a tad frustrating. 

But then I read David Kirby's poem and I found words for what is somewhere in the periphery of my brain and heart and gut.

...what is Shakespeare 

doing if not throwing everything

against the wall and seeing

what sticks?

Yes, I thought, that is what this week has felt like. Throwing stuff against the wall and hoping I haven't totally lost my mojo.

Kirby continues about Shakespeare...

we see the world as it really is, 

a mishmash, a glorious shiny mess 

where I am king and you are queen,

but neither of us wears a crown.

Yes, I thought, mishmash. Maybe not so much glorious and shiny, but mess to be sure.

Then this...

 

Don't limit yourself, poets!

Do  you think Shakespeare said,

"I better limit myself.."

 

Yes! This whole exercise is about not limiting myself. A year of writing after a year of hardly every writing deserves a chance to test the limits. This can happen...right?

 

...because Shakespeare is so generous,

so kind to us...so possessed of a 

mind that makes no distinction

between anything and anything else.

 

Is that my problem? Too many distinctions? Reaching for something that I don't need to be reaching for?

 

an elaborate game that's totally

realistic and, at the same time,

make believe.

Ha! Maybe a bit more fantasy is needed, more imagination, more understanding that this isn't all THAT important. It's an elaborate game I'm playing in my own mind. 

a dream no one has dreamed yet,

but you're in it, and you're the star

Okay. Caught me. I think I'm so original, such a star. A little humility, gurl.

 

For some reason I felt compelled to color the picture of Pegasus I included on this post, even though I had no idea what meaning it could possibly bring. So I checked back into the Pegasus story and found he was instructed by Zeus to bring lightning and thunder from Olympus. He is the creator of Hippocrene (a fountain), and allowed Bellrophen to ride him to defeat the monster Chimera. Some stories have him dying at the hands of Zeus.

 

Sheesh. And you thought Shakespeare was throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks? What about those Greeks? Clearly, it is all an elaborate game we play to entertain ourselves. What the hell else are we doing when we tell stories?

 

We are all limitless poets, dreaming a dream in which we star.

And...gotta admit...it's an elaborate game of which I'm rather fond.

Thanks, readers, for playing along.