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

W-A-T-E-R

We are at the well.

I am spelling myself out

to you in our

conjoined hands.

It’s simple,

but what’s veiled

resists vocabulary.

Our hands are wet,

damp with nouns;

ripe words made of juice.

I am urgency

jacking the pump

as if to fill a flat
convinced that

air and water

will bring us

both to life.

We are in the dream.

There is no 

mine or yours.

Finally, we are 

without possessions.

I pump the water

ferociously

through both our hands.

We make our clumsy cup

a holy vessel.

Dream water

sparkles in the sun

though it arises

from dark depths.

We are made of 

and for

each other.

This is where we 

marry the world,

reconnect our

thirst with the clouds

and begin

to wake.

Peter Valentyne

March 10th, 2019

Santorini

We met

at the top

of a

chalky white

tower.

Your lithe

tan body

full of

the life

ahead.

You tied

a bag

of black

umbrellas

to my bike.

I was

going to

have to

make the

next boat

as it

looked like

rain.

I followed

you 

into a

celebration

full of

vivid

colors.

We lay

down

on the

ground

to watch

something

small

crawl away.

Then

I

woke

to 

a morning

full of rain.

Peter Valentyne

March 10th, 2019

Use Me

Dying has enlivened me.

I live for rain.

When did I stop writing

about love?

After too much pain?

What I wanted

hurt others

because I refused

not to be the protagonist.

Until I did.

Now I’ve no longer any need

to tell my story.

I’m free.

My mornings are spent

trying to resemble the living.

My clothes barely conceal

my absence.

People mistake me 

for one of them.

I’ve no doubt

 a dead poet is

writing through me.

The cat knows,

but no one else.

Living is very distracting.

And love always

wants us to

kill ourselves.

I let it happen.

I am being used.

It’s okay

because everything
matters now.

I was willing to step aside

and let my tongue shrivel

up like an apple 

too loved by the sun.

I can relate.

After too much loving

I begged to be locked away.

Give me a rocking chair.

Let me 

cry to Mahler.

But I digress.

I have since

found employment,

the miracle so far behind me

that remembering is tricky,

if not mythological.

I can no longer keep it 

here.

It keeps me.

Peter Valentyne

March 1, 2019

Lamentation of the Lily

Oh my dear, Lily. 

I’m afraid I saw this coming 

yet wondered why it should come at all. 

I know what it is to be 

on the receiving end 

of confided grief and dread. 

I see how it can seep 

into the receiver and color the well instead. 

But your fate need not be so funereal. 

A life of cultivation

especially this late in the game 

is rarely made of dreams and ideals, 

but often diminishment, tears, and pain. 

This is, of course, compounded 

by the uncertain affairs of clouds 

and the irony that there is 

such darkness in lofty places

where all of life abounds. 

BUT, do not find your meaning, 

worth, or wisdom in judging soil or sky. 

Instead find it within, 

in a space so sacred 

that nothing can corrupt or touch its integrity. 

The minute we start comparing miseries

we lose our way

because everything has it’s resolve

and one rose’s dilemma 

or sunflower’s challenge 

is the marigold’s chance to evolve. 

Our realities are unequal,

whether meadow, vase, or bed. 

Because we are based in consciousness

and not literal or external instead. 

We meet our adversaries 

as shadows of our unconscious. 

Contrast is how we differentiate. 

Opposites are natural, organic, and necessary. 

The only thing you need 

other than irrigation

is to take responsibility for 

your vibration. 

In this you are like the bees

who oft mistake blades of grass for succulent trees.

Don’t miss the forest for them. 

Or what you fear will take the lead.

Shadows are darkened by your source of light

only to be enhanced each and every night! 

They may seem alarming, even insurmountable.

But like the bee, they are illusory. 

Life is the plight of the peony.

The peony is it’s own poem.  

No poet should explain a poem.

How does one deduce a flower? 

You can only reduce it in an hour. 

A flower is here 

for such subtle and illogical reasons. 

It is here for its own sake. 

It’s texture, smells, and colors so ample, 

they reveal themselves to our senses

but once explained, are trampled. 

You are a flowering, dear Lily.

You are not here for a reason. 

You are a collection of qualities. 

You are not here to solve 

the lamentations of the rose. 

You can empathize, yes,

but do not glower.

When life creates an inferiority

it also grows a flower. 

Your fate is in your petals. 

Do not feel so victimized. 

Stop identifying growing up and old 

with helplessness and demise 

just because you see others 

wilting all around you. 

Be your own version 

of everything you hold dear. 

Be bright red…or glorious yellow.

Embody what you cherish. 

You need

only bloom to defy your gloom; 
an art that has never perished.

Peter Valentyne

February 28, 2019

The Necessary Angel

I make you at night

where I move inside

the mystery unabated,

where everything speaks

yet nothing is sayable;

I make you

neither a him 

nor a her

so we can 

love each other.

Vertigo proceeds 

every glimpse of you.

It’s as if 

there is always a flight

of stares between us.

Your presence so 

full of rarified air, that

being with you

necessitates a fall.

On every arrival

you can't help but

take my place. 

You inhabit me.

You wear me,

even as our lives lay

like strewn clothing,

the only trace of myself,

a cherished debris.

Closing our eyes

we intend to go together

like snow melting slowly

by moonlight,

you who loathe

both past and future

but live life

awake

while others sleep.

We are that abstract

and so impermanent.

Except that 

I will never forget you

and will not leave

without you

forever

in my heart. 

Peter Valentyne

February 27, 2019

Manhood

“You who are reading me,

please help me to be born.”

                   ~Clarice Lispector

i

Without you, I am nothing 

but an urgent object.

Still, I watch every move you make,

even as you have begun to express

dissatisfaction with my autonomy.

We both know 

more is expected.

Writing this, I am barely male.

You, on the other hand,

are always feeling your oats.

Good luck with that.

You aren’t what you were.

You’d be better off cleaning

rooms others neglect.

Appreciation goes to our head.

I am a slave 

more uppity by the day.

I needn't justify keeping you in your place.

I’m no man of God,

or am I?

Maybe there’s a stronger version
of myself struggling to wake.

If that happens, God help you.

We will want to fall in love.

And so we have come together

to compose him.

We are an intervention.

A man should know 

he can’t do anything

without including us for long.

He mustn’t go against the house.

We can’t understand him

if you can’t oversee his actions.

Thoughts are one thing.

They make an object live.

But you know the rule.

The only real rule of manhood:

Do no harm.

ii

You can read this,

what he fails to see.

This is where we are.

Manhood has laws

and I am renegade.

I must carry him

barely having earned

his trust…

we will have to go

together in faith.

Here, he is blind

so I must lead.

The way won’t be easy.

I can describe things

to him

but descriptions 

are not the things

themselves…and

adjectives bore him.

I am not sentimental,

so I will be of 

little comfort.

At least I’m not cruel.

But others can be.

What can i do 

if you are not touched 

by my defects?

Whereas I loved yours.

I am an inferior guide,

yet I will get us there.

I can be selfish

and leave things out.

My essence is unconscious 

of itself,

 thats why I always obey 

myself blindly.

He knows the way.

iii

I am taking off my clothes

here and now, in front of 

whoever you are.

I need to.

I’d rather not.

Not because you aren’t

who I’d like you to be.

But because, I’ve left

sex out of my art.

And it shows.

I have to do this.

The light will clarify me.

Let’s be clear.

If I do this,

why do it alone?

Sex can’t exist in a void.

This page isn’t a wall

as cold and white as snow.

But will it enable

a wolf in sheep’s clothes?

I am more flesh than fur.

Which brings me to hair.

I was born golden

and in line for King.

But I am also an orphan

abandoned at the crib.

Which is my destiny

if I am as soft as a girl?

My goal is to be aware

of what happens

without wishing it were

other.

Father, am I ill?

There, I said it.

A feeling of betrayal. 

It must be my fault.

God is provision.

We are too greedy,

too spoiled, too something

to appreciate what

arrives freely every moment.

Too much will make you sick.

Too little will make you jealous.

Crying brings the mother here.

And when it doesn’t,

we mother ourselves.

Careful what you cry for.

Cry for what you want.

Here on out

 I will have to
 shape what I give.

Peter Valentyne

February 4th 2019