Scene 1

In mezzanine cheap seats, you cross your legs  
and ask me what three of the 
Loneliest places to die would be?
you think dying in the street where you grew up,
would be marginally less lonely than dying 
in a city you have always wanted to visit 
but never been to before 
but not as lonely or traumatic 
as drowning in a communal pool.​

​

Scene 2

Mesmerised by double lines

and parallel technicolor bars

across a CRT TV playing a 60’s rendition of Ecclesiastes,

a thespian works a midnight surgery.

Drilling holes into jaded people's skulls

to insert ballads of satisfaction.

As you keep sending me slurred voice memos

of what love is to women.

​

Scene 3

In the following act,

the thespian wakes with a start.

(hurt, coldly)

With a stifled smile,

he explains his aftermath of having cut down on his drinking

and how it made him realise the life

he has now has always been the life he wanted.

 

Scene 4

(with exaggerated boredom).

He further explicates,

how families carry shared myths

and personal disappointments across generations.

‘L'appel du vide”

that has been felt for generations.

 

(with a thousand-yard stare),

he goes on to say how

our sins are hardly original,

they are imitated and inherited.

The dead and the deserters a

re easily forgiven,

why do we not write letters anymore and

why we do not frame phone calls or screenshots.

 

Scene 5

(He takes off his newsboy hat, peers inside it, looks for blood stains, shakes it, puts it on again. Then goes on to compare time to a melting ice cube.)

​

But I had already stopped listening.

to the discursive rambling of the thespian.

Instead, I try to conclude

what you meant when you said

you wanted to shape the present in the image

of the irretrievable past,

Like the unnamed narrator from White Nights.

 

Scene 6

On the morrow, I told you how

Happiness feels like a loose cloth

but sadness fits me perfectly like my father's clothes

“Sorrow is the heart of love,” you said to me in response.

 

​Curtain.​

 

Scene 7

Having failed to come up with an answer

I settled back into what was happening around me.

The thespian was practising his elocution lessons

over-muttered chatter on his CRT TV.

​

(With the door at the centre having already opened and, without knocking, THE ARCHBISHOP enters. formal choir dress, mitre, cigar.)

 

ARCHBISHOP: (while taking off his hat, does not remove his cigar)

​​​

Scene 8

He is here to discuss a recurring dream the thespian is having.

Where he is a door-to-door salesman,

but the product he sells changes every day.​

For the first week, he was selling home insurance.

Instead of knocking, he would pry and eavesdrop on the houses

where he was supposed to be selling insurance policies.

​

Scene 9

The first time he ever did it, he saw a reproduced

Palais promontoire by Yves Tanguy

which made him want to take an ocean voyage

and within that dream, he had another dream

Working a graveyard shift selling

in a form that never was, in a place that cannot be.

After which, he was supposedly arrested, but the arrest was never confirmed.

​

Scene 10

The dream following that

he is a tap dancing shoe salesman

he sells them with his first girlfriend (not sure how I know that)

the tap dancing shoes are made of rose quartz,

that leaves an indelible fleuron mark on your legs.

​​

Scene 11

For every sale and subsequent return (possibly due to the marks),

they celebrate by drinking a bottle of Coeur Clementine.

She died soon after from a ruptured eardrum.

Followed by a mis-translated obituary and

the only picture he had of her

Ending up in a Berliner newspaper.

​

All of the dreams end the same way

with him in a confessional, with sunburnt hands

Confessing everything he had was not right either.

 

ARCHBISHOP [to the THESPIAN]: Take some Zyprexa, Seroquel, and Abilify, with Clozaril, Dying wouldn’t make you whole. [He exits.]

 

Scene 12

Our first conversation happened after a Halloween party

when you made an off-handed comment about a

Boy, you found secretly pretty.

 

Then something about your coincide roommates

I could not get the language right then

you were part of the coastal elites, and I was part of a band.

​​

I cannot remember whether you told me

Whether your landlord ever fixed your heating.

“I knew it, but I didn’t know it.”

 

Curtain.

​

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