Je ne sais pas

Je ne sais pas
I don’t know what

We were watching this French movie
where all the characters just sing
their lines to one another as if
it were the most normal thing,
as if they always heard an orchestra
playing somewhere beyond the horizon,
plotting notes for every step of their lives.

They were singing but there were no songs,
and I thought that if this is what life as
a musical were to be like, I’d want no part—
I want to wake up with Fosse dance numbers
and choreographed steps out the door,
with the chorus line close behind on my tail,
the sun shimmering like a disco ball.

I don’t know what these French filmmakers
were thinking when they pieced together
this beautiful film—the actors, the colors,
the sets, and the music are all so beautiful—
but it’s lacking dancing and real songs,
those true, powerful, tearing down the ceiling,
climactic pieces that make the audience clap
even though the actors on film can’t hear.

Yet it is evident that the French understand
life the best, because our fair lovers end up
apart with separate and very different lives,
and run into each other once more as it’s snowing
in the end but, as I predicted from the start,
it didn’t have a happy ending, it all fell apart,
and the lesson was taught again, that life
will never be a real musical, never have happy endings.