The Last Words of the Technical Manager of an Imaginary Theatre in Kabul

February, 2019

His troops come like ghosts,

To the tick of an enormous clock,

Dancing shadows, urgent mutes,

Out of work ninjas dragging their smokers lungs,

Guerrillas in stage blacks with prompt books,

Leathermen, turbaned men with toy guns;

the front and back ends of the horse,

& stage blood. Lots of stage blood.

A new recipe.

They break only to eat fire, sip drip coffee and goss -

Or close the wall up with our English dead!


Tock! & the cue comes again.

O, how the wheel becomes it!

How many calls, cues, and prompts,

How many wrinkles for the whinnies and mews of their warm actors, friends:

“Romans, countrymen,”

How long before the next martyrdom?

LX go.

SFX go.

Corner! Corner!

Coming in.

The war inside the walls wars again with the war outside. The inside war gives the outside war more meaning or less or just more war.

“No equity five here,” he says.

There , fixing a hole the rain pours in, there taping things, there sewing a thing, there macgyvering,

they are heroes of art.

Fuck the avant garde.

When dust settles they sweep and mop

For fearful ghosts who come in from the street, to our old buildings, they speak, they speak to them, they speak to the ghosts: ghost stories of the special, midnight operations of technicians and managers at art,

Who sit back, deep in the box, to

Shoot tracer rounds into the long night of the theatre

Gritting his teeth, spitting his tobacco.

No time to weep for today’s explosion.

The ceiling leaks again.

He grins: “No fucking equity five here.”

* All the poetry shared here is work-in-progress.