Tickled Pink By Kevin Kling

[mfh]

Kevin: (from On Being on NPR) And so this was a song that I wrote....when you were feeling your best, my mom would say, "You're in the pink," which meant that your insides were pink. And so this poem is called "Tickled Pink":

"At times in our pink innocence, we lie fallow, composting waiting to grow. And other times we rush headlong like so many of our ancestors. But rush headlong or lie fallow, it doesn't matter.

One day you'll round a corner, your path is shifted. In a blink, something is missing. It's stolen, misplaced, it's gone. Your heart, a memory, a limb, a promise...... a person. Your innocence is gone, and now your journey has changed. Your path, as though channeled through a spectrum, is refracted and has left you pointed in a new direction. Some won't approve. Some will want the other you. And some will cry that you've left it all. But what has happened, has happened, and cannot be undone.

We pay for our laughter. We pay to weep. Knowledge is not cheap. To survive we must return to our senses, touch, taste, smell, sight, sound. We must let our spirit guide us, our spirit that lives in breath. With each breath we inhale, we exhale. We inspire, we expire. Every breath has a possibility of a laugh, a cry, a story, a song. Every conversation is an exchange of spirit, the words flowing bitter or sweet over the tongue. Every scar is a monument to a battle survived.

Now when you're born into loss, you grow from it. But when you experience loss later in life, you grow toward it. A slow move to an embrace, an embrace that leaves you holding tight the beauty wrapped in the grotesque, an embrace that becomes a dance, a new dance, a dance of pink."