Shoulders up around your ears?

A poem wondering what the universe thinks about that.

Photo by Adrien Bruneau on Unsplash

Mine are, nearly always. That’s my only qualification for writing this poem.

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BALANCE


Standing at a crosswalk, waiting
for the light on a cloud-bright day,
I remember a friend’s advice
and invite my shoulders to lower and relax,
and as they try I feel their anxious twitch, 
their urge to lift again and tighten.

You don’t understand,
my shoulders tell me.
If we relax, nothing is safe.
We brace so we can balance
the weight of the world between us.
If we relax, it falls.

Silly, says the ghost of a most-full moon
in the cloud-bright sky above the rooftops.
It’s not you and your little wings of bone
who balance the world, it’s me,
and it wears me to a thread.
Look at me working the day shift
to keep this stubborn planet spinning,
and who minds me any more,
or even looks up to see me shine?
But you, relax – or don’t, it doesn’t matter.
The world is not your burden to bear.

She’s right, says the cloud-bright sky,
so quietly I almost miss it.
Not yours to bear, and not hers either,
though don’t tell her I said so.
And let’s be clear, it’s not the world
you work so hard to balance, it’s your head,
round and heavy and spinning like a planet.
Don’t try to bear the world
on your shoulders, little one,
just live in it, and balance your self
the best you can. Just now, for instance,
look, the light is turning green,
mind your step off the curb.

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[You can listen to an audio version of the poem — along with some traffic noise from 26th Avenue — using the little widget above the photograph.]

Truth time: I heard each part of this discussion at different times during the same out-and-about afternoon, then packed all of them into the one moment that seemed to matter the most. Journalists rightly get pasted for behavior like that, which is one (more) reason I’m not a journalist. Poets get to tell more fibs while they’re telling the truth than journalists are supposed to.

And, honestly: it’s okay to let your shoulders down. That’s not a fib. Dropping mine as we speak.