come, curtains!

I dance limpingly along from song to broken song, the hobo’s reel upon the sinking stones, the fool cavorting in the lowlands with the waters rising. I take the sticks, I take the stones, lumping along in these lonely bones. The pain, the wounds, the days a waste of smoke and prayer. Ashes brushed off as the next station is taken. The past elongated with each clock tick theft, the act never much and now off key and missing most the marks. All the words are staged, at least if you read the notes.

It turns out, once the early reviews are in, that you are a bore, you are a churl. You’re the whole reason someone hates the world. No one is interested in your cool new take, no one cares about your best interests. They can sell, or spin, or quote tweet you. The heckling is the most practiced of the arts. They tell you to be yourself, just do it differently. They tell you to never change, and ditch you with the check.

A cloud stripes the sunset horizon, the visible bandwidth resonating, a rainbow streaked across the day. I ache straight through the resonant dusk, all the gnawing ghosts and nested curses hectoring me breath to bone. Strange how the urge toward the human is always mocked, the hapless oddballs that miss the cut, those undeserved of their story or its telling. Another animal to be scried as symbol in some big dumb self spun mystery. Barely a player and still somehow stepping on their lines. So much for joining a company, let alone partnering up to put a new act together. The show unwanted and unwatched. The lights go out, the curtains fall without a call.