Shoulders

The inspiration. On the 28^th and 29^th of February 2019, Friday and Saturday, I took part in the ballet show A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in Mendelssohn’s music and inspired by Shakespeare’s play of the same name. It was the last great event before everything collapsed to covid. There, I had the fortune to be portraying Lysander, one of four lovers, who elopes to the forest with his beloved Hermia, followed by Helena (who is in love with him) and Demetrius (who is in love with Helena). Two gods become involved with this love quadrangle, Oberon and Puck, whose miscommunication results in the latter dropping juice from the flower of Forget-me-not in the eyes of sleeping Lysander. As a result, he wakes up in love with Helena and thus hell breaks loose. Now, in our first performance of the show, as I woke up from my sleep and jumped alive on stage, I felt a crack: my left shoulder was dislocated and relocated in an instance (I had dislocated it a few times over the years). Behold the first appearance of the Parrot. This event, and how I continued dancing under these circumstances, is narrated in the first half of the poem. As for the second half, it narrates my experience with the shoulder-sit, the stunt in which the boy lifts and sits the girl on his shoulder. Although the two parts chronologically took place simultaneously, the Parrot only took over in the first half. Without further ado, enjoy!