The Stage

I was on a stage, and I couldn’t have wanted anything less than to be there. The audience was bitter scraps of rusty eyes capped glue to my stillness. Their silent mania made my eyebrows frizzle with scorched anxiety. The floor was wooden strips of vomit streaked varnish, and any wrong step looked like it could, would, be fatal. But I was there, like it or not, and I had to meet my delusions of inadequacy half way. Blind it with the glare of reckless delivery. My first thought was to sing, dance, what more could they want from me? A poor boy from nowhere important, born of a mother who told me constantly to keep my cheek pressed to the gravel if I could help it- don’t ever look up or they’ll expect you to have a reason for it.

The lights were commanding and hyperlectric, unnatural suns of intensity shored on my lone figure. I was glanced pathetically with only my meager sliver of a shadow for support. I looked nervously from side to side; maybe I could avoid this after all. I could find an exit, dash for the cliffs and hope to never land. But there weren’t any. Moldy velvet mud red tarps hung like tons of slumped shame covering solid brick facades to my right and left. Each brick bore the emblem of a red-haired clown grinning nastily without teeth, brightly gumming caustic encouragement to nobody in particular. I could hate nothing more than that clown. I hated it as if it were the sole reason for all of mankind’s suffering throughout all the ages. That clown, with its carnation pink gums, was no less than evil incarnate- and I was in the middle of a stage constructed with bricks bearing his acrylic, gleaming likeness, not an auspicious beginning.



So it all comes tumbling down, no more grappling for guppy lifesavers. Not now, not on this mountain of human trials.

And so I sang. I sang of beauty truth, passion prairies and pantheons, novelties and neurotics, any delight the mind could sip in sweetly, and of all the monsters dripping tar out of any man’s ears. I sang vocal chord collisions and decay. My tongue was dipped in concrete and my throat was carved to gashes of stone, hewn by the urgency of my song. I sang to saliva tears, and stopped. I could sing no more.

Those little bits of metal malice shook earthquake vibrations at me from their golden thrones of mini-supremacy. They were the masters of my ballet, and I was only here to entertain. And, it was clear from the stage, that every glittering tooth in that audience wanted nothing more than to gnaw my body frigid splinters. I was not entertaining. It was not the song they wanted.



But I was on a stage, and my spine found roots in beaten toes that, like ancient nails, exploded fragments from the woody knock floor, and I began to dance. I danced like cranes flying kamikaze crazy into icy waters and flapping white-feathered boil into an ice cube expanse. I danced like lovers lost to all but each other. That world that spins in a blind sputtering orbit until “I love you” isn’t good enough anymore and claws of glass crawl into the crevices of unknown realms found dormant in the vacuum of divided and cracked unity. I danced like man on hangman’s noose, pendulum swaying to the godly breeze of his last sense rhyming moments. I danced with all the sinew veins and blood my body possessed, I spilled bile through murky pores onto thumping foot floor. I danced, and, sprawled on my sanguine knees, arms folded like fragile twigs over my heaving breast, I collapsed and could dance no more.



My eyes speckled with dirt gnawing delirium, I blazed eyes at my surely knuckle ravaged, soul entranced, palm raw, ovation consumed audience and met with only titanic failure. Such rage I inspired in them that their vibrations of fury clanked into ear splitting collisions of monolith smashing granite steel to form a cruel symphonic melody of my own undoing. I had nothing left to offer these titans. Their demands were beyond what my mind, entranced, could consummate.



I stared, eye to eye, globes of pupil iris and vein, the oceans of being and intent, with each of them, and suddenly knew what they had wanted from the very beginning. From the moment my bleary eyes saw light and cried victory over nothingness as an infant, every trodden step on grass and tile, every breath from gasp to gratified sigh, it had all been a long, impatient, build up to my climax. And it was always meant to take place on this stage, this stage where nothing but the unraveling of sanity and humanity, strand by strand, could satisfy.

I wavered in drunken epiphany and fell like a golden cross, clattering onto an unforgiving floor. I writhed and squirmed like jelly copper and, one by one, broke every bone in my body with a gong strung crack. I was elevated with each bone to the visions of pond water ripples of tranquil blue, hedged by syrup brown woods laced with confetti strands of greenery. I was getting closer. My body stammered under the divine agony of its own self-destruction as I defaced the skin gilded walls of my self-contained temple to a bleary dribble of tissue and blood. My eyes were glazed fantasies of golden bubbling cascades careening off majestic blue skies silhouetted by chocolate cliffs. I felt myself pour gracefully down what was once my throat and knew that it was done. They had witnessed a man turn into a god. Material turned silent vapor. Dissipated consciousness flowing like shadowy phantoms into the night’s star and moon splattered cloak- The infinite eternal.



But, more importantly, I had entertained, and entertained well. I did good, I thought, as those putrid curtains slowly blocked my final glimpses of a crowd seduced to a state of molten frenzy and admiration; and then, quite suddenly, I got the overwhelming feeling that I needn’t feel, anything, any longer, and I wept.