You who were always changeable, always unsteady,
draw your life into rivers, your tears into performances
played again and again behind the velvet curtains of yet another stage.
Starving for the recognition, the respect. Bleeding for the applause,
and forgetting the lost girl who built her life around your words,
washed away in each storm.

And when had you ever helped anyone weather storms?
You who stole ships and slept beneath the stars, the unsteady
life of a wanderer, a self-styled troubadour, selling your words
for bread and sleep and love you would betray each morning. Performances,
executed impeccably, until even you forgot who you were without the applause,
who you were beyond the costumes you wove for the stage,

made of dreams and hopes and things forgotten. The stage,
an empty home, a haunted life. And you, nothing more than an actor, inventing storms
when there was nothing else to do. Willing to style yourself into anyone for the applause
you craved, the applause you lived for, in an increasingly unsteady
existence, consisting of performance after performance,
until even you could hardly separate what was real from the words

you claimed to believe, but never did. You who knew the power of words,
the power of the metaphors you invented for the stage
you had made your life to be. Each day, a performance,
each emotion, a farce. And when the storms
rolled in, you closed your eyes and counted the stars. In an unsteady
world, you imagined yourself to be untouchable. Imagined applause

in the tearing wind, the roaring waves. Applause
was your wine, your bread. You imagined yourself to be built of words,
created and formed by your own two hands. Beautifully unsteady
in a terribly constant world you never tried to understand. A staged
tragedy, a non-existent creation, and a never-ending storm
you invented and denied. A talented performer,

always forgetting the girl in the wings. A girl at each performance,
clapping her hands until they bled. Hurting herself to give you your applause,
the exhilarating high for which you would never thank her. And when you stormed
around the house you claimed was a cage, she would wait, used to the words
you flung like weapons, used to the apologies she invented in a staged
world of that which never occurred. Your unsteady

affection, a gift and a cross, for the girl who prayed in each storm for a word
of love she would never receive. Convincing herself this was not just another stage
of self-destruction, as you perform and she applauds and her world remains unsteady.