Behind The Scenes


A black curtain divided the main big room of The Market Place from a smaller private storage area in the back where color filled characters would go to imbibe the current vibes.
One evening as Indian Joseph walked out from behind the curtain wearing a new old costume of imaginary native attire luminous in the dim bluish lit underglow he encountered a high school crush sitting at a little table with her date. Some cat was singing a Leonard Cohen tune on a postage stamp shadowy stage. ‘Suzanne takes you down to her place, near the river. You can watch the boats go by. You can spend the night forever.’

Joseph:Hi Dalia, what a trip seeing you here.
Dalia:Joseph, this is a surprise. What’s behind the curtain?
Joseph:Oh, that’s Behind The Scenes. Where we go to escape this world. A room in which dimensions may change like the shapes of shadows thrown from a star. Am I here or is it the shadow of a star that you see ?
Dalia just looked at Joseph, already a collection of images imprinted on a fictional past.
He never saw her there or anywhere again, except in the multiple magic mirrors of memory that is. (She was of Nordic descent, a young goddess with pale blue eyes, immaculate cheekbones, auburn honey blonde hair, a tall girl composed of achingly attractive curves and musical movement, swaying when she walked like a fragrant wind rustling silk garments through the branches of lyrical summer trees. She gave him her telephone number, conversing for an hour at a time after school. She would play the teenage temptress. “Come to my island the weather is so soft, sweet and wild. Here we may play some lovely games forever and a day.” (Him a precocious callow Ulysses dreaming of her satin pillow isles only resisting from some nascent twisted childhood emotional trauma not even beginning to be resolved at such an early stage.) We can journey anywhere we ever were or ever will be in this mind. It is indeed magic traffic mirrors.
Even as it is written, paint begins to melt in this simulation of experience. She is a miniature painting forever singing on her imaginary island of long forgotten spells.







Poetry by Chaucer Whethers The PoetBay support member heart!
Written on 2026-07-19 at 15:06

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