A Festival Hat and Shades
There’s something wonderfully subversive about that reflection in my shades. 😎
It’s me looking at myself looking at myself, caught in the mirrored lenses of my own festival day swagger.
It’s like the universe briefly turned me into both the photographer and the photographed, the watcher and the watched, the performer and the audience. A tiny hall of mirrors tucked into a pair of shades.
And yes, it does feel emblematic of our age: the way our devices fold us inward, the way we’re always half performing, half observing, half critiquing and half obsessing about ourselves. A quadruple half existence. The modern math of insecurity.
And yet the moment and that flicker of “oh, that’s me, caught in the act”, is also deeply human. It’s the same self consciousness poets have been wrestling with for centuries.
Poets (Robert Frost, in particular) would have had a field day with this. They would hone in upon the tension between the outer world and the inner world (doubt, longing, identity, the quiet ache of being a person).
They would probably have seen this reflection not as vanity but as a crack in the facade, the moment when the confident wanderer pauses and realizes the road forks inward too.
So here goes,
I catch myself in my mirrored shade,
A ghost upon my own parade,
A traveller pauses mid stride to see
The watcher watching back at me.
The tents flap under skies bright and blue
Yet something gnaws my pride, a thought perhaps true,
A whisper from an inner frost,
“Each step you take recalls the lost.”
But still I walk, and still I try,
With a borrowed confidence, a humour wry,
For my paths fork with every glance,
And even mirrors invite me to a merry dance.
Miku
🦩A message from The Nonsense Chronicler Pink Flamingo about the hat 🦩
🦩Upon Miku’s brow the patchwork sat,
A wanderer’s crown, a poet's festival hat—
Its rim all frayed like a half‑told tale,
Threads whispering secrets in a ragged veil.
Stitched from banners of festivals past,
From cloaks of bards whose songs still last,
From jester’s cloth and minstrel’s tune,
And scraps once kissed by a harvest moon.
It bobbed as Miku hummed his lore,
A hat that had danced through a thousand before—
A riot of colour, a carnival’s dream,
A tumble of stories bursting at the seam.
Yet I, the flamingo chronicler pink,
Perched on one leg with time to think,
Saw one small truth the hat forgot:
A flourish it needed, though it knew it not.
No plume of rose, no feather bright,
No blush of pink to catch the light—
A single quill of flaming hue
To crown the chaos with something true.
For every hat that’s lived so long
Deserves a feather, bold and strong—
A whisper of nonsense, a wink of delight,
A pink‑plumed blessing to set it right.
And so I offer, with gentle flair,
A feather for Miku, the Bear Bard fair—
To tuck in the rim where the threads unwind,
A spark of flamingo for hat and mind.
🦩
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