1. composition
A tone-deaf man at a concert says to his wife I
reckon they're taking this too seriously these
people look at them sitting in their rows
shirts boots all pressed and polished
their hair slick gleaming in the dim stage lights
and him with his opera glasses look there the way
he lifts them the flute of his fingers who
does he think he is the ponce a real closet case look
there at that woman her sequins
are louder than the music god if I caught you
dead in a ditch wearing something like that
I'd be ashamed to know you
who does she think she is
I bet none of them have any idea what this is really about
can't even speak German sipping champagne fancying
they know fuck-all about music with their Vah-gner
and their money and their sequined dresses and god
those opera glasses and none of them I
reckon have ever worked it out they're being charged
twice as much for terrible seats I mean really
the only way to listen to this sort of music is
at a distance get too close and it swallows you right up
makes your eardrums burst I should know I'm
telling you none of them have any idea he
says who do they think they are and she
says darling, they're everybody; darling,
they're the audience.
2. we wear ourselves as pictures
I have imagined you looking at
me looking at you
often.
I have imagined the way your eyes slip
sidling upward, the cool sweep of your
round skin smiling; I have
imagined you in that skin and me in this
one. I have imagined you, looking at me, looking
at you the way an artist looks
at the subject of a painting, all lines and angles,
and seeing instead the light
and the pleat of shadows across your face, or that
when you look at me and I at you we see
the same us that they see; a kind of truth
in vision I know cannot exist. And I imagine
often
you have looked at me
imagining I am looking back.
3. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead [Reprise] (link)
– There is nothing suspicious about death, he said,
matter-of-fact one morning laying out the paper,
pointing to his own name in the obituaries with
forensic precision: nothing suspicious at all, it's
been around for a while
since forever
forever wouldn't know what to do with itself
without death. – But your death, I said,
is supposed to be different.
– Different how? – Just
different. I don't know how. Are there
qualities of death, like jams, like wine, is it
better to have aged or better not to have lived at all?
– They talk about it like we can tell, he said. Untimely death.
Is it early or late? Tragic death. For whom? A man who's dead
can scarcely find any tragedy in it. – Well, I said,
for the people left behind. – Where am I going, he said,
that I've left you? Here we are, talking
about life and death across the dinner table,
here's your coffee and my toast, just the way I like it,
here is a morning repeated a thousand times
like a thousand mornings before it, only I am dead.
Nothing suspicious at all.
– I never said I suspected anything.
– But you looked it. You looked suspicious. When you
sat down this morning you looked at me and you said
(only without saying, of course, it goes
without saying) you said, how can it be that you (that I)
am still here, still demanding my toast be cooked just so
and my eggs just right when in fact it says here
(tapping the newspaper) in clear bold black-and-white print
that I am dead? – Well, I said.
– And it's not a misprint, a mistake, a miscalculation or a
missing persons, they have the body and everything.
Old guts and glory's gone in the ground, and here we are.
– Some kind of afterlife?
– No such thing.
– Memory, then. A trick of the senses.
– The mind can only trick a man if he wants to be tricked.
Do you want to be tricked? – Well, I said. I'd rather not.
– Well then.
– Well. But supposing I were tricked anyway?
– Against your will, you mean? – Yes. What's that?
– Illusion. The seeming of a man who is not there.
– Are you here? – If you don't know, he said, how can I?
– Perhaps you can only be here if I observe your presence. If
you are a dependent creature, and your presence is dependent on me,
perhaps I am the only one who is really here at all.
– It's a funny thing, he said, for existence to depend on.
– Yes, I said. – I mean, what if you were to stop looking
and perceiving and listening and touching and I were still here
only you didn't know it, because you'd have
logicked me out of existence? – It'd be like death, I said. And he said
nothing.
Spoiler! :
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