Time For Change

I'm gonna to change my way of livin
and if that ain't enough
I'm going to change the way I strut my stuff.

Not even ten days into January and already I've broken my New Year resolutions; in fact I can't even remember them.

I wonder how change ever happens. Not the sort that turns a cucumber into a pickle. Evolution is as natural as devolution. I mean real change like the striptease of Clark Kent into Superman or the way Meryl Streep gained six inches to play Julia.

Republicans become Democrats and vice versa when someone says, "may I?" and they take a baby step across the aisle. But that doesn't count. Rarely do we witness a public figure shed anything deeper than his skin and risk leaving his cronies. Hugo Black, the liberal FDR appointed Supreme Court Justice did it when he brought his Ku Klux Klan white sheets into the laundry and walked out with the black robe of the court. Or was his racism a tumor as Woody Allen would have it?

I just remembered my broken resolutions; that I would stop losing bookmarks and slouching on the couch causing the cushion to work its way to the floor. I'm sorry. Some habits just cling to the bone.

As for altering my politics, that is off limits. I enjoy agreeing with myself.

However as Whitman put it, we do contain multitudes. Maybe there is another Georgy deep inside.

Doesn't everybody have a conversation going on with their several voices? I can hear my tired phrases drop from exhaustion even as my unbudgeable mind defends them to their death.

Six and eight are always fourteen except when the plus sign tilts and it becomes forty-eight. The new idea slips under the door unbidden to make its sweet sound or just silence that same old song.