Reinvention - Oct 5 2022

 

Reinvention

Oct 5 2022

If reinvention were possible.

If one day

I could wake up changed

and feel different in the world

without cosmetic surgery

witness protection

or a journey of enlightenment

what would it take?

Will my new frames

be enough to make me over?

Will I metamorphose

into someone cool, studious, avant-garde?

Or will they make me disappear,

so common and conservative

invisibility

will be my super-power?

Or will it be the world that changes?

The new lenses

bring it clearer and closer,

make my resolution sharper,

reveal details

I never knew I'd missed?

A more granular world

with all its wrinkles showing;

but nothing, I suspect

any better resolved.

My very first pair of glasses

were a revelation,

as if a light had been switched

colour discovered,

instantly transporting me

from Kansas to Oz.

But now so much older

is change really possible?

Can such superficial tinkering

make me what I’m not?

Or am I too known, fixed, self-satisfied,

too comfortably cocooned

where I've been all along?

Because a plastic frame

hasn't the alchemy

to change a caterpillar into a butterfly.

Certainly not enough

to turn plain, sluggish, and earthbound

into a diaphanous creature

with iridescent wings

capable of flight.

So I chose something nice.

Something no one will notice.

Something in which

I will see better

but be seen even less.

Selected new frames yesterday. (Still waiting for the lens to be made.) So, as they say, write what you know. And it takes a lot to mine poetic gold from such a mundane diurnal life as mine 😕