“He played a lawyer”

He played a lawyer
    in a made for TV
    movie about cloning, murder, and genetic testing,
but in real life
    he was working on his law degree—
“Look Sidney, just between you and me,
the script needs work—no, not at all. . .
the story’s good, but there are technical problems,
like when Mike tells Janice about the will—
it’s flawed.”
So Sidney gave him a technical consultant slot
and soon he was inundated
with discrete requests
from the acting and artistic communities
about the law of reproductive biology.
And thus his life followed a natural progression,
one which flowed from one pond into another
without much thought,
    following happenstance.
We are startled, sometimes,
    by the avenues luck seems to take us,
but on its face it can seem banal,
    when we would wish it to be sublime.

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I am thinking about my narrative poems, so I decided to share this little one from 1998. Hope you enjoy.