When the world is a song

and the pigeons cooing are the cool old bass player in the back corner of the stage, sunglasses on as ever, shading him from the world, the world he keeps a quiet tempo for, asking for nothing more than a crumb here and there.

And the beat up old four door wriggling & writhing through traffic horn blaring & horns blaring back are the trumpet & sax players, all blowing their top for god knows why but them, & maybe not even them but if they stop everyone knows that the Great Hand that winds the clock will stop too, & there will be silence

 

unbearable silence

 

And the brown round eyed girl screaming and aching into her cellphone at the boyfriend who doesn’t love her as she Loves him will have no accompaniment to her mournful eternal singing

& the tempo will be all wrong & the sun that is the spotlight will be forever shattered & the stage beneath our feet will grow soft & sag & we’ll stagger crumple and fall never to perform again

lost to the underground archives of Time

& a new genre will appear

 

For the world is a song

and there is always music

it just wouldn’t be our music,

our blessed and frantically holy statement that WE ARE HERE and while we are let’s blow our tops for god knows why but that’s enough

that’s enough

 

Because the woman in the pantsuit with the 3 ¾ inch heels tic-tacking down the harshly lit linoleum hall is so obviously undeniably the drum player that we don’t even bother to notice

like the fish that asks his buddy “what the hell is water?” And if the fish asks that then what in god’s name are we floating in?

Though we’re probably not supposed to know

 

But that doesn’t mean we can’t bop & boogie along to the beat of it all,

we do anyways

 

For the world is a song