07.
A star is born again,
not to shine but to sputter
from the sidelines, undetected.
Another brighter sun at center-stage,
a brilliance radiates,
eclipsing every fainter glimmer.
Watching from the wings with
other chilling late-types,
curtain-shadowed,
colorless and small,
taking furtive sips from jacket-pocket flasks
and misanthropic fantasies.
Golden spotlight beams aim elsewhere,
leaving vice to flourish in this dim beside,
outlines blurred, flaws alluring,
happily deformed by the mismanagement of shapes.
This mold has finished casting all its copies.
Ah, the cool relief of going missing from the sky,
detaching myth from living.
But darkened stars still point a path,
even after shirking off reflective skin
and fading to apparent absence.
Bombarded by the onstage radiation,
these stellar remnant castoffs shed their ions,
etching into surfaces they land on
the inscription of a promise
never to arrive,
too painfully pretty to make it.
the in-between*
© 2020 Barry Perlman