Reinvention
Oct 10 2023
What I didn’t know
was that all the cool people
who intimidated me
and seemed so at ease with themselves
— the retro hipsters
and trendy fashionistas,
the bohemians and artists
and earnest activists —
who seemed born
to cosmopolitan life
were hardly that.
Despite the purple hair
and fluid sexuality,
they came, same as me
from small towns
in distant hinterlands;
drawn to the city
but in the beginning
as awkward as me
in the great metropolis
that never sleeps.
Came from modest homes
and buttoned-down folks
their teenage selves
found so embarrassing;
good Republicans,
who fuss over lawns
and unsparingly grouse
about gay lovers,
welfare mothers,
the price of ground chuck.
Young people
who somehow managed to reinvent themselves;
their small-town alter egos
neatly repressed
behind a sheen of urban cool.
Or perhaps they were always that way,
and the city
is a magnet
where all the outcasts and non-conformists,
ther free-thinkers
who never fit in,
and the creatives
who live for their art
accumulate;
drawn to its pole
by some invisible force
that seeks them out.
Who finally find “their people”
among the millions here.
While the rest stay
and lead conventional lives
in podunk towns
in Kansas and North Dakota
upstate New York.
How uplifting to think
that people can choose who they are
and how to be.
Or is it destiny?
So it seems it was with me;
returning home
after all,
still overwhelmed
by the big brash metropolis.
A small fish
in a small pond
who is what he is;
no amount of reinvention
could make me what I'm not.
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