Other People’s Stories

Other people’s stories hold a certain glamour
that oft feels missing in ones own life:
the fascination of the movie screen,
the burning tube in the living room,
the words flowing from page to brain.

Distractions they are from what befalls us
in the somewhat bland gulp of reality stew -
the stew in which we find ourselves
daily and without recourse except escape
to other people’s stories

Yet, occasionally, we find ourselves immersed
in the romance of our own story
and follow it down the beckoning path
through twists we never expected
with joys and sorrows truly our own
experienced in a way other people’s stories
deny substance or depth and remain hollow
while This one, Our Story, weighs solid.

But then, inspired, we seek to express
to the listening world our experience
in poem, in novel, screenplay or tale
and we lose it to ourselves, it changes.
The exact thing cannot be expressed
so we give the best we can in detail
or vaguely in places, but we fill gaps
and in doing so we rewrite our story.

Now, after such much prevarication,
perhaps we take the next step:
fictionalize whole parts of our history
using Real Events and True Feelings
as mere backdrop for made characters
to act out their parts on rhetoric’s stage.
Then, reminiscing, we find these guys
have overwritten our own memories
which have become
Other People’s stories.