Playacting Myself
by Odin Roark

Clothes might make the man,
except white jackets make something else.

Not that the color isn’t fine,
I see it fullfilling many a uniform.
Nurses, okay,
but others should be different,
you know?

Maybe I’m wrong,
but seeing costumes inside my other world,
is, well, with no glittering buttons catching light,
no laid-on makeup,
no quaffed hair atop faces,
there’s merely expressionless,
unyielding stares,
expressionless,
like me.

And yet…

From out of the dark
impersonators keep entering.
“My name’s Hamlet.”
“I’m Big Daddy.”
“Call me Kowolski.”
“Say, isn’t that Godot?”

Man in white jacket smirks,
“Godot is imaginary.”

When Pozzo and Lucky winked at me,
two guys without any costumes,
just dressed in “altogetherness,”
that’s when I knew.

F*** the forever opening nights,
being this for them,
that for others,
everything for everybody.

I’d be my own show,
be myself,
good or bad reviews.
Bring it on!

They told me that’s why I was here,
why I too wore a white jacket,
the straight kind,
keeping me padded away from my nightly dreams,
from the only reality I had left.

They say I yell in my dreams.

“Waking isn’t an option!
You hear me?
Not an option!”