Returning My Neighbor’s Saw*
“Would you jump from a perfectly good bridge,
just because your friends are?”
If the bridge is in Rome, my friends being Roman, I do what they do.
If the bridge is on the highway,
the majority of drivers plunging distractedly on,
There’s no need to reinvent the wheel.
I keep up,
match pace,
go with the flow.
If I can’t beat them, I join them.
I don’t march to the beat of a different drummer;
I fall in with the rest of the troops.
I follow the leader.
I follow, or I get out of the way;
on a bridge, the result is the same.
If it were not my friends on the bridge, but my boss,
and my boss said “jump”
that’s what I’d do.
I never walk alone.
There’s safety in numbers;
It’s still a democracy, isn’t it?
If fifty one percent are in favor of bridge jumping,
as an upstanding citizen at home, not an assimilationist in Rome,
I cast my self in with the majority.
Keeping up with the Joneses
does a fine job of keeping our neighborhood white-washed
If it’s fashionable, up-to-the-minute,
I tend toward the trend, and tip myself over the cutting edge.
Would I jump from a perfectly good bridge,
just because my friends are?
I don’t want to make waves.
* saw (sô) n. A familiar saying, especially one that has become trite through repetition.
(from thefreedictionary.com)