The man in command of the whole stage
Has always remained a stranger to me,
A stranger that comes home with me,
Insults my body, carries out the same gestures
And abhors the unintentional mimicry
Of my face and hands.
He steals the spotlight with a smiling face
And the crowd doesn’t understand that the
Surface, the loudness thereof, is all they can get
And they are overwhelmed by the superficiality
That knows so well how to pretend and perform
Without true substance.
I am looking for the presence of this staged man
In my life. The traces his words left, or the way
He looked at me, disappointed, self-recognising,
Revolted, seeking destruction without doing much,
By being absent yet present within stories that don’t match
The man or they really did in retrospect.
I was convinced that your presence in my life, next to me,
Was a necessity, a pain so normalised and familiarised
That I needed it to sleep and feel validated. Your absence would
Have been easier to handle. Sometimes, my body mutates
Into your footsteps and I wonder is it you or me?
Your life is a different one in your memory.
I speak to you about the person I’ve known
And you have no idea who I am talking about.
All the crippling edges supposedly erased
Stand tall in my head. You make me stumble back into
That house where you had all the power, your fist
Holding all the strings, cramping in agony, every
Single part of everything staged irreplaceable to the world
You think you lived in.
Croque-Melpomene 