Mondegreen

You’ll likely have your own list of these:

misheard lyrics amusing to recollect

and share with feigned shame, once the pop tunes

of life’s soundtrack subside to the stodgy

opera of adulthood, and you hum along

to the baffling language of grown-ups,

your voice settling into its lower register.

But you keep to yourself each lapse as you learn

the words to your middle life arias--the noble

vocation revealed as just another job,

the stranger’s face mistaken for a soulmate.

And still you sing, sure of each verse

in the shower, belting out a bravura piece

in the car with the windows down,

the landscape in your wake littered

with pages of that mangled libretto.