Age-Strife

“Disgracing the National stage,” is how 
the critics-cum-sages deemed the disas-
ter. Who reads the Business Post anyhow?
The morning after the death of pizzazz.
Irrational heartrace- an unwelcome
rerun- ti-titi-tum- fourteen hours straight, 
no sign of abate, owed to eleven
everlasting seconds of silence. Age-
ing in an instant my opening-night-
hopeful face, painful pinpricks of sweat, snot,
skinburst bubblewraps, belying freeze-dried 
tongue and Gobi desert gob. Which. Will. Not. 
Speak. 
Somewhere- a line striving for utterance,
dying to fulfill its function. Someplace-
smothered, submerged in subconscious quicksands,
absent, abstract, somehow lost in face-space. 
Is it something I can ever trace? I
remember thinking. A line crafted by 
most skillful hands, from where brains abound, and
are enwrapped in feels. Lost in Translations…
Meanwhile, unimpressed and restless, gawking hawkeyed, the overpaying theatre attendees. Vulturine in the stalls. Envulturing in the circle… 

Cue tumbleweeds through dust filled wind
Cue stage-manager half-truthfully excusing ‘technical malfunction’
Cue career-killing bad reviews
Queue never again the paying public to see me
Cue trapdoor opening, me swallowed whole, emblazing my soul in the gallows below
Cue… queue… ‘What’s my CUE!?’ 



In those eleven eternal seconds: a flashpause of serenity. 
A memory. An episodic apparition…

Summer. I’m a footy-mad kid, and truck-driving dad surprises us. A visit. 
Caterpillaring kerbside up the Cul de Sac- armed with spirited 
tales of slanted people with limpy accents- dad and his manly monster mobile.
I dive out in front, a new ref’-conning trick, a self-trip, but concealed.
Hoodwinking whistleblowers is the name of the game. But on that day,
seeing father’s face displaying the pain I feign, two insights I gained:
That he loved me at that age, and all’ the world’s a stage.

I should've been a truck-driver

Bar Reward
London, 
UK