When once I beheld

“Adulthood could be defined as the process of learning to be shocked by things that do not shock teenagers.” - Roger Ebert

When once I beheld a cynical pose
the font of adult life,
a carapace of irony
protecting me
from all that slit my heart,
I’d never quite maintain the grip
required to see
the world as comedy,
as farce, and not a tear-strewn tragedy.

When young we most of us
who grew up “sensitive” pretend
that we’re not sensitive at all,
that life’s a joke we’ve heard and told before.
But we’re always the joke, really,
and in the end life’s both, a tragicomedy
in which the players earn their arc
by learning both to laugh and cry
regardless how it looks.