The Shape Of My Life
from If I Could Live Long Enough by Tobin Mueller
What have we made of our lives?
What is the shape of my life?
Have all the edges been torn
Am I old or reborn?
What is the shape of my life?
Who can shape a lifetime?
How many hands have shaped mine?
Whose caress brings life? Whose touch brings death?
When all that I love, slips through my fingers,
Can I shape a future with these hands?
We carve and we scrape,
We smooth and we shape each other. Yes, we shape each other.
And sometimes we cut and we tear to reveal things,
And the scars that grow back have no feelings.
And we seek out pain trying to remain
The same cold crafted likeness,
Someone’s work of art.
Can’t we draft in rightness
Each cell, part by part.
And start,
And start
To live life.
Nothing more, just live life,
Like before my hands turned us to clay, waiting…
I will not let this shape my life,
A life that’s mine to make with my dreams and tears and secret longings…
©1995, 1998, 2011 Tobin Mueller
This song is from my Off-Broadway musical Creature and features Woody Mankowski singing the part of Victor Frankenstein, Jeff Cox on acoustic bass and Dane Richeson on drums. It is the second example of a musical soliloquy in the show. "A Promise" occurs early in the show; "The Shape Of My Life" occurs later in the show. Victor Frankenstein is not just a renegade surgeon trying to cheat death, but a gifted sculptor. Thus, his references to hands and artwork apply to both his sculpting flesh as well as clay. As you know from the story, he fails to shape the kind of Creature he intended and feels as if he has failed. This is when the song appears in the story.
I cut one verse in this version, recorded during the 1998 Rain Bather sessions. I loved this recording so much I attached it as a Bonus Track to the 2011 digital release of The Mullers Wheel. But it didn't really fit into that project, so it was dropped when the album was pressed and rereleased in 2012 as Müller's Wheel.
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