I spend so much of my life acting, when all I want is to stop and read the script

I’ve been in the habit of telling my parents a story – that I have a job.

After all, stories are indeed part of it. There is the usual narrative of course, which is never seen as such but  instead as ‘normal’ – that I get up at 6 am with the appropriately misted eyes, straighten  by body into a collar and a pair of shined shoes. They praise my dedication to ‘occupation’, the assumption stops them  reading into things anymore.

But I sift through stories, I cannot assume  anything.

For every week-day morning I go to the town library. I stay there at 9 am, in the fictions section, beginning ‘A’. Then at  my ‘lunch break’ I board a bus to the next small town and go to the library there,  again to the fat laminated ‘A’ in the fiction section. I will ‘work; through them, I will gain experience, I will earn -  nothing.

Why are they hated, those who gain yet earn  nothing?

But  everyone is assuming, happy in the knowledge of my ‘occupation’. The old women who observe me,  cross-legged in the corner, nursing the book over my knee, think I am ‘on break’ from the office. The librarian may think I have been jilted  by a partner, a lad working as a town centre apprentice clerk or something similar.. (meaningless phrases)

Yet the only intimacy I have, the only solidity beyond assumption, is the book; the smoothness of the spine, the beautiful sensation of turning pages. In a place so public it makes my skin creep.  And the connections. The delicious sensation of seeing people, reading. Sometimes I will go and pick up the book after they’ve pulled away and hope to  follow the lines that they did. Best, perhaps, most savoured, those books bound in tarpaulin or a fixed fabric, so the title cannot be read.  It makes the ‘outsider’ ‘guilty’ (ah, what apostrophes can mean) I have to imagine the genre as it works its way across the readers face, over their mouth, into their eyes. I see people reading and disappointed, exasperated, angry, I heard a man mutter he wanted advice that was ‘easy to understand’. I am trying reading people reading.  I know that I feel something different, yet in a string of words, we are monetarily connected. Sometimes, library books  have pages so worn the edge of the paper has begun to curve.

Like the slight curve of my palm as I wish I could offer  this to you. 

I’d give you my address if I had one

You like to think you know why

I look out from the corner table, drink in

Conversation, inhabit elation

With a slight flick of the wrist.

My throat never moves

As the beer tips

And my eyes freeze, close, freeze

I am the pulse you leave

In another year. Like the paint dried

Over what your said was a tear-stain

On your bedpost

The rented accommodation, the half-made

Array  of promises, the cries in the dark.

Everyone feels alive clutching glass

Rather than sheets, you can feel the knife

Your touch has become.

I have lost the time

And the offer

Of walking me home

Enters your voice.

It sounds deliberate

Like the risk I entertain

As the strangers witness

My slow discomposure.

I have lived in these thoughts

Longer than I can remember

Watched the exhibitions of gentry

As my fingers go up in smoke

Will be crossed

In the dark street later

I grab your hand

Beginning to laugh –

For this is my home

This unfeeling mask

Are we  escaping and hiding a similar process?

Under the eyes of a streetcar

We are bound to confession

I would give you my address if I had one

And you learn the lesson

Looking at your hand afterwards

And seeing only tissue.