Spotlight up on a half-lit dream—
rows of folding chairs, a ghostly proscenium.
I step from the wings in last night’s costume,
still smelling of exit music and café rain.
Call it a class in vanishing:
how to exit laughing, how to enter alone,
how to hold a final chord until it cuts your hand.
Curtain trembles like a pulse in the wrist of night;
I bow to the dark that taught me I was light.