Watched : Watching

There’s a secret hidden between the grass, an old treasure that twists out of the air, the blinding blue hidden behind the umbra of a moon veiling a million faces. A child’s eye blinks sleepily under the young hum of the sun, cumulus and clumsy as the puffs yawn and ebb into portraits of people, flowers, and dragons. Where the pine hangs heavy along the proscenium bend.  

See the play’s the thing despite the world’s a stage. And in the spectacle of childhood your parents would watch because look at you go. 

Just look at you go,  

Backseat of the car, the front seat of the trolley, the blinding white bleached between the aisles as you’d plead for sweets, sticking your arm out in rebellion as towers of toilet paper collapse in slow motion, sheets upon sheets like blank scripts waiting to be written. And somehow you’d end up skimming through covers in the video section. Now all the tapes are of you.  

The training wheels come off and you’re off running, running between the lines till a dialogue emerges from the polymer of planes, cranes, commerce and clouds. It’s hard not to listen to the chitchat of metal. Those cirrus sickles that whip action into reading into collective study. How each grain conceals a hurricane as soon as the kid settles into the crowd. The monocle-monologue never changes its frame. The angle may differ but the lens remains the same. Some part of the play gets led astray and what’s left is sipped then swallowed. There are roles in the water, in the river that floods the streets with reflection, the soft direction of organised disarray that creeps across the city like a ceaseless cabaret. 

Now the red curtains hang old and lofty. The brass rings have lost their lustre. The beam leans at a tilt like a seesaw splintered by the clamours and claps of generational performance. The micro-thunder of a thousand people pressing their backs into the plush. The final act waiting in the wings, watching as plumes of dust dance into the air like dozy geysers. Up up into the empty space. The space that constantly floats above our heads. As we look forward, as we wait — seated, stood. Dust older than time itself.  The space that’s always there to fill. Watching. Watching the red curtains hang, old and lofty. Knowing that if anyone drew them they’d collapse. And yet, the actor prepares.  The final act waiting in the wings. At the precipice of empty space, parsing a past that’s hollowed. 

Still, the actor prepares — 

And the rehearsal runs since the shop won’t close. What more can I offer if I’m always for sale? Wooden floor boards lay bare across the back of the jaw. An idle light tremors between the joints, a dim glow shaped like a pencil pointing itself at the mirror. The private trade of detail, the display I can’t evade, as glints emerge like hands through the splints of the tongue, sharpening, tethering the lips, sketching a face frame by frame til the lead breaks and the song can’t be sung. Filings spree, crooked feathers scribbled across the glass, like starlings in delayed murmuration across an inverted dawn. The spotlight burns a hole into the back of the head like a grey globe poorly drawn. Muses spawn from the edge of shadow as I trickle gently into the milk of darkness, into the green honey of money. I promise there exists a music that’s different, I’ll exchange it for the sound you say is gone.  

Ba-dum ba-dum, ba-dum ba-dum, ba-dum ba-dum. 

I can hear the tube running. That constant triplet that beats the tracks. Ba-dum ba-dum,  ba-dum ba-dum, ba-dum ba-dum. I imagine everyone hears the same thing. I imagine everyone notices it. I imagine the conductor’s the size of a city, waving a baton the length of a building. But I’m too tired to pay it any regard so all I see is skyline. 

I look out the window and see the hundreds of panels oscillate between fluorescence and sunshine. A metro-disco ball we’ve measured in confluence with a star. Refraction and reflection upon refraction and prediction. I open the wardrobe and measure my threads.  What costume works best today? All the columns of fabric remind me of the first time I got caught in that tunnel between two mirrors. The dull ache of the endlessness of you.  Though if you stand just a moment longer then the terror slightly subsides, as you notice the stillness concealed in the middle of that gentle infinity. The quiet coalescence of the many in motion, a private-public fluctuating in proportional multitude.  

The front door opens and I enter stage-everywhere. I look for the one that’s looking but then I remember it was me who at one point swallowed the eye. We’re all in the market for imagination but the accordion of imitation draws the longest breath, as the keys fill in the gaps accordingly. There’s a chord for each street and each player an instrument in its ring. Neighbour to stranger, friend to foe, frame to frame like a pre-disposable camera, I go toe-to-toe in the conversation between concrete and the sole that stands to grow. Those small pocket rituals when we pass each other by. I see you and you see me. What is it exactly that we agree to be in that split-second ceremony? Under the urban chandelier, there’s no need to count the steps; I figure we’re all just about in the know. These parts have ancient blueprints, like a kotsuzumi ringing three times before the Noh, the kakegoe before the kabuki commences, I’m Pinocchio but don’t worry I got you though, the carpenter’s revised all our sentences.  

Ba-dum ba-dum, ba-dum ba-dum, ba-dum ba-dum. Just look at us all go. 

The crowds never cease to surge over the crossing, those rows of black and white that speed up and bind like a film reel, that wind in entropy organised into the geometry of the everyday, into the fabric of the thing that to many still feels real. There must be more to the character that plays the feeling of novelty, beyond the tedium of perfecting a happy medium as mere mimicry. Yet when I press my back into the plush the seat now seems colourless. What remains is a prism that dances in the foreground, who moves and talks and looks just like me. It shifts and weaves between the aisles like a calculation.  No matter what I do it seems I cannot impart any new choreography. Like a hedron refined beyond reaction, this shape knows me before I do, as I move further from human and closer to scenery. I wonder if I coughed up that eye whether I’d match its pace and symmetry? I wonder what I leave behind in place of the gospel of safety and the sacrifice of privacy? Maybe I’d move beyond the circuit into a life led by brevity? Even if the soul of wit exists only in the ritual of conversational levity. Perhaps as the gears and years continue to turn I’ve made a peace with the orbit of mundanity. It’s fine, I’ll watch you and you can watch me.  

Somewhere off the seeds of a dandelion break, flying and swirling into an old theatre and begin dancing with the dust. The final act that exhausted its suspense never shows, the actor continues to prepare. Somebody’s child who’s long been kept waiting suddenly runs onto the stage, drawing back those old red curtains trying to catch the space above, as the beam comes crashing down before the performance can even begin. Even now I still wonder what I saw? I still wonder what will become? No matter the data that shapes the stage of the world, a light that’s measured is a light that’ll never truly be known. There will always be the secret hidden between the grass. In the act we call play.