it is annoying when your told to smile when you want to cry. It never worked for me!

Smile though your heart is breaking... Like the unmistakeable great gash of red on the clown's white face, you know it's there if you try or if you look very hard, like recovering the plastic bouquet from the hidden depths of Coco's yellow-chequered overcoat. Yet we are faint from overcoming when it DOES surprise us, as you say, in a flow, a crackle or a spontaneous sparkle whose naturalness takes us unawares. I DO love the way you have ended this, as it were, back at the beginning with perhaps the magic of the tooth fairy: really! :)) xx

If you look at this poem as though it was a flattened cigar band (strip of paper) and bend it into meeting end-to-end, the words "...my darkness" are shoulder-to-shoulder with the word "Smiles" (title), which then makes the band a contiguous circle of life-- dark, light, dark, light -- a pinwheel of yin yang that spins in the turn of events and becomes various shades of gray. Gray, in that case, isn't a bad thing. . . it has the good mixed in.

I like "the dampness of rushing." It fits nicely with my terms rushmania and rushinator. "lift your threads upwards for joy" gave me the image of a marionette smile. "cut short by my fear" adeptly reveals the elusiveness of joy, such that it is hiding under a pillow. But that isn't so negative as it is 'universal human condition,' in my vision, because it IS under the pillow. ~~ DIana

..if this is lightening up...nuff said;
it's your way of seeing and evaluating
that truly matters and you, Odin, never disappoint

john

Underneath that pillow of darkness you will find who and what you are looking for . . . And you may not like what you find. Yes, Odin, you did lighten up, but in the end there was the dark.