my heart went boom

Last night during the fifth-grade play
the little girl playing Titania
grimaced through her lines
saying, “Come, sit thee down upon this flow’ry bed,
while I thy amiable cheeks do coy”  as if the donkey-headed kid playing
Nick Bottom was covered in shit.
But still, we all laughed,
and clapped our hands sore
when the poor shadows bowed and hammed it up
for their many curtain calls.

“I’m like that, “ I told my wife,
as we walked across the parking lot.
“What, like Nick Bottom?” she asked.
“No, like a kid reciting his lines in a play he doesn’t understand.”
She smiled then stroked my ugly ears.
“No you’re not,” she said
and the wind pushed through the lot
sending the electrical wires above our car
swaying crazily from their poles
as if to remind me
that each moment,
every single one,
is almost more than
I bargained for.

- © John Straley