The Pursuit #5 The Actress

THE ACTRESS

So now, tell me, what's up, waitress. The chandelier

hangs feet up from the ceiling and the paper puppets
wait for action. But then, only the actress would be able to see them,
to touch them and make them breathe and speak.
She's out to dinner I guess and the bookshops are closed. Books
and music,
apart from dinner music maybe, are none of her worries. She may have glanced Kurzwellen
on her way to the dining room at Donald's Dugout
in the shop window of a second hand vinyl named Rose Music,
Human Head Records at 168 Johnson Ave or The Thing at Manhattan Ave further north,
without noticing any of it, hardly that perverted sign at the bottom of the black and white photograph,
as she frames her nervous smile in the mirrored scene behind her. She's late
and actors any so often are a nuisance to her and unpredictable.

Hanging above her household, not even half-lit,
the chandelier

notices a weird coincidence, as the stage beneath him appears to be a rectangular form
quite close to that of a baroque lute
with nothing but a muffled groan coming from it.

Asked what he knew about its long-size silence, after the groan had faded
flirting with a sound of naked shoes, mice behind wall-paper,
the janitor would recite his first lines, without getting any further.

Oh, oh, oh, he couldn't. Oh, oh, oh,
he couldn't, he couldn't, he couldn't. What a mess.

Unclothed, harmless signs, and eager an audience as dead mice.

Of course the actress needs to get home first. Sitting half in front of television and half in front of a partially corroded burger king, one of her cinderella shoes on, the other beneath the cocktail table.
Of course. Sure. Yes, oh yes, she would have loved it. Oh yes, yes, that cinderella trick bowing beneath the spotlights. She loved to be in the spotlight. What's his smile for anyway. Unfortunately enough, getting down on the carpet, on her back, she got both shoes wrong and a spot of rouge on her newest dress.