Elsinore

The cold air, the pale moon-- it could have been anything there that lit the candle. The shine upon the skin of the sky seemed like so much more before. That glaze of stars and darkness, that mingling of atmosphere and text. That is the trouble all along, knowing the script, knowing the show. Once your part is cast, everything left is the play. There is a light in a guardsman's portion. Ghosts, you know, abound.

It is a kind of madness, this theater. It is a kind of memory when memory is lost by blood. You leaven tomorrow with imagining so accurate, changing the inflection and bending the words. Ice quickening on your tongue, as breath is breeding water. The monologue so familiar, so chained with habit and weight, changing suddenly to another style and meaning. The ending assured, the show still must go.

Could it be in hushed arrival, a parting of pikes measured by the cast of every shadow? Could it be in your braying verse, the poetics of anguish seared by wit? The folly of names, the farce of corpses-- so many pages remembered clearly yet unknown. That curse, that castle-- the Dracula keep from all those cartoons. Do you recall it from curtain or your entrance? Do you remember your exits based on those green room kisses, the back stage romances that are all your favorite reviews? Or are the words so written on the pages of your days that every new notion is repetition. The only mystery, the curtain call.