cowboy shoes

cowboy shoes
  
Well this isn’t a poem, not yet. But yea, it, meaning me, does wanna come out to play.

There’s this prompt, write a poem with your “shadow voice”. That’s your (or my) voice that got left behind once upon a time, some part that didn’t seem safe or acceptable inside my vision of the world. Simple huh? But simple can be more confused than something complex often enough.

I keep going back to this picture of so so younger me. I felt the connection, but it was light, maybe even a slight-of-hand. Not that I mean my shadow is a child. More playful. More happy, for no good reasons at all. I held those “thoughts”. But even as I wrote the prompt for WWP it became obvious that I was still holding those “dangerous” attitudes at arms length and had to rewrite the prompt totally from scratch. That precisely is the challenge of this prompt for me!

My shadow plays. My shadow is more spontaneous. My shadow is more willing to be visible, to take a chance. He’s good natured. He will tell you what he is doing, and will invite you into the play. He’s easy to understand. It’s not so much that the world is more trustable, but he is. And that is the root of his life.

Writing that prompt was sort of my poem for me.

So that will have to do for now. Lots of work here and there to do and poems are riding in the back seat right now. Yet wanna respond to this prompt. My shadow does. And I agree.

The tip of my hat, and we’ll be back again. Soon and more more often, we both wish.

  
Written for the We Write Poems prompt #149,  write a shadow voice poem.