The Never-Ever-Ever-Leaves-Town Circus
Anyone and everyone of every station, in every nation,
In every state and stage, nook and cranny of his or her sacred journey
Through the phases of aging's maturation,
Should attend a weekday-evening or Sunday-matinee performance
Of the legendary Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus,
Whose "Greatest Show on Earth" is no exaggeration,
Rather a spectacular, miraculous, merry-band extravaganza
Replete with child- and parent-pleasing trapezers;
Cages crowded with terrifyingly real, growling, fang-mouthed felines
From the rapidly retreating wilds of India, China, and Russia;
Clowns decked out to the mischievously silly tatterdemalion nines,
With their oversize, trip-over-themselves shoes and putty noses,
Checking off their laundry lists of faux-pas pratfalls, capers, pranks;
Young, muscular, handsome men and buxom, pulchritudinous women,
Flying, spiraling, circling, vaulting, catapulting, spinning, twirling,
Not only through the air but beyond our most amazed expectations;
Elephants, horses, dogs, trained to perform colossal impossibilities,
And merely for the enormous reward of a minuscule sugar cube.
Everyone, from three to way beyond the longevity of Methuselah,
Should treat his or her dormant, it-can-wait, some-other-time fancy
To such an all-too-stupendous two and a half hours a year, at least,
Just to renew the wellsprings of imagination's spell-swelling cells,
Be reminded that we spend too much of life's here-and-gone time
Mired in the serious, unfluctuating tasks that render laughter an anomaly
And that every once or ten twices or a hundred and thirty-three thrices,
In our however-many-decades phases,
We need to leave behind the quotidian, pedestrian, plebian, mundane
And exchange them/it, for a fresh breath of the death-defying,
The never-beheld-by-the-likes-of-human-eyes,
The too unspeakably, unbelievably, incredulously, never-before-performed-
Let-alone-attempted-in-front-of-a-live-audience feats of a lifetime,
If for no other reasonably unreasonable reason
Than that we need to escape into a make-believe microcosmic cosmos,
Where we can stuff ourselves with the most sublime fruit of all:
Salted-in-the-shell peanuts, which we'll roll around in our mouths,
Crack with our teeth, spitting the hulls out, any everywhere we please,
While a real-live, flesh-and-blood, fire-bellowing giant winged dragon
Hovers in the wide-eyed, shimmering disbelief of thrill-filled children,
A mythical monster setting even post-pubescents' adrenaline ablaze,
As it circumnavigates a universe of its own creation,
Beseeching every all of us to take it home, in our forever memories,
Back to our small-top lives, and keep it unleashed, in our bedrooms,
Where it will wait, just as impatiently as us,
For the very, very first announcements of next year's circus to appear.
10/15/12
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