LOSING LINES

You are chugging along,

totally in sync

with the character

you are playing,

when, without warning,

the bottom falls out,

the lines you are about to speak

aren’t there anymore.

They’ve flown the coop.

They’ve lit out for the territory.

They're gone.

So, suddenly, you are free-falling

without a safety net.

You are off-off-book.

There is no obvious next thing

to say or do.

There is only the NOW

and the how you will pull

a rabbit out of this hat.

So what do you do

when there’s nothing

but the stage you are standing on,

the glare of bright lights  

and the faces staring up at you,

watching and waiting…?

You improvise, what else!

And this shouldn’t be so hard to do,

‘cause, come to think of it,

this is what you’ve been doing

all along, every day. Every moment

is a rabbit-out-of-a-hat trick,

because you aren’t working

from a script, right?

So in a sense, your life

has been preparing you

for when you do forget your lines.

The point is:

remember each moment

is an invention,

a Pollock, a Hemingway, a Dickinson

that will bear your name.

Mind the gap. Embrace it.

Learn from it.

Because life is the lines

you write in the moment,

not the ones you’ve been rehearsing

painstakingly in front of the mirror.