Theatre of the Deferred

In dreams

I am my own

understudy.

Every night
another

big break.

The truth is:
I'm being made
to play myself.
To go on

I must enter

through a trap

in the floor
that signals
my acquiescence.

My bed sheets,
the white flag
of my surrender,
a page without script.
Night is no writer
but it's theatre
built upon
a compost of dreams
produces nightly
artful improvisations. 

In this one

I play myself

at a crucial age

when everything

was still possible.

A rare memory play
in an age of forgetting.

As a producer
night is brazenly tyrannical.

He likes me helpless,

vulnerable,

off my game.

His concept:

always the avant garde.

The house lights dim

and the players join in.

The stage manager 
is feral,

clutching my diary

like a dog-eared bible.

Sexless, he (or she)

illuminates the stage

with a vanity mirror

that bounces light

off the moon.

Ragtag caterers arrive

like a band of bit players.

Out of the darkness

someone whispers "Places!"

and things go 
south from there.

The dead 
make their entrance 

without applause.

Someone I loved

has unfinished business.

Take note:

every prop an impromptu artifact.

Rousing to a lack

of occasion,

I look down at

my body in paralysis

lying discarded,

an obscene marionette;

my fate made fictitious 

by questionable facts.
I brace for a reckoning.

Asleep again, 
I live only in the past

an anti-body

unable to discern

what is happening 
and what is not.
How would you feel
being made to star
every night

in a black sky

of un-finished stories?

Tonight, I'm cast as the Garbo

of multi-duplicitous affairs.

My loneliness

used for so much mulch.

I am in turns
overwhelmed, frightened,
joyous, and enervated.

Tonight I'm given parents.

They enter stage left.

Has Beens desperate for a come back.

The woman playing my mother

I recognize from a commercial 

for Mutual of Omaha Life Insurance.

But she makes the scene work.

I'm in tears in no time.

My distress giving her something

to play off of.

Am I the only one

not acting in this sideshow?
How is one to act
when portraying yourself?

Are these dramas
messaging me from
inside
in order to aid me in
an acorn's individuation?

I am my own fodder.

Who’s version of night

turns me so inside out?

Every evening's production

is meant to undo

what makes me tick,

to force me open,
even while I'm

pinned like a starfish

to a plank,

my five senses

held in place

beneath a shriveling 

midnight sun.

Peter Valentyne

March 12th, 2019