#33

Sestina for Summer 07 and Kerasotes Theaters 12

My worried feet hit the warm pavement outside the theater.
The people in winding lines, who do not yet disgust me, laugh.
I do a work squirm into a bowtie and a mauve hat that deadens my hair.
With this dumb dome only eighty year old women give me a smile,
right before they buy a landfill's worth. I persistently worry
about the popcorn level, filling myself over the paper edge.

I watched several things birth out of the screen here, on the edge
of my seat for a midnight ride. But, the new feeling from the theater
is only a constant churn of acid and butter flavor. The way the worry
forms inside of me, grasping and groping until I flee from the old laughs.
The shows are a horror variety here where managers lurk stealing smiles.
Looming, they smile over me with blunt performance warnings. It wilts my hair.

Tucked away from this viscous drudge I remember a slender girl's hair
on a hot, nervous first date night. I only managed to see the edge
of the screen for the view of her strange, alien figure, wishing for her smile
to explode into frame. It stayed loose and absent. So, there is the theater
that has always had this heart of disappointment inside of it. High pitched laughs
of new teens and their sticky wars in the aisles haunt me, adding to the worry.

In the soda circles and burnt hot dog vomit, I presently wander in worry
that I cannot sweep in proper ways. The popcorn sticks to the hair
that worried itself to the ground and ground itself into gum. The laugh
of the man on the fake radio station is a demon rattle. I think his knife's edge
is so sharp to cut the human condition as it does, in half. The blank theater
managers who yanked him from Hades must have found a beautiful smile.

I sing hard and embarrassing in the gray, droning back room to prepare my smile
for times when it is an actual thing. The beat up band that leads my worry
into a different place. Out the community center doors and around the theater's
hot, twisted grasp. Their claw diminishes with the chorus and dies with a hair
whip and a to-the-rafters yell. Time erases so quickly that it has no lasting edge.
Its bite is soft and numbing. It leaves little moments to catch your breath after a laugh.

Day dawns when I hit the doors, that final midnight shift over. I have a single laugh
for the moon, which must be my new sun. The fake radio devil carves a new smile
onto each thing I do. I confidently come across the pavement and at the edge
of the glass doors ride into the old place, where always an hour and a half worry
salve waits, through the impotent hell-travelers and salty smells. I can let my hair
down in the dark rooms. No longer the arbiter, broom splintering in hand, of the theater.

With my crown down the weightlessness marks me. There are other things to worry
people into the ground like edges of popcorn. I laugh, smile, and run as a hare
into a future full of green places. There is not enough natural green in a theater.