they, the maestros

there’s barely half an hour

from spotlights and stagehands, to 

streetlights—to the rattle of keys in their

small apartment door. they board a train that rolls out of the

capital; an artefact of a good evening kicked to the gutter by a 

breath of ‘polystyrene-tray and fake-meat’ scented exhaust. 

impoverished art has them enraptured. their solicited

harness of satiation and sentience. they taste something bigger, 

like city promises, as sensational as a single salt flake on the tongue

after famine. nightlife consists of the theatre detainee; 

dressed in black and buckled at the knees in addiction. 

they nurture a nocturne and narcosis headlined by auditorium aisles  

a rich red colour: of cheap wine and the culture,

old lamps, ornate ceilings, eclipsed by 

rows of grubby scarlet felt tacked to theatre-seats. a body of nerve endings

tackle instruments and unify themselves by the term orchestra: 

a pseudonym for salaried alchemists. a recipe per stave for escape.  

they play, and craft, and spell, and play. 

within hours, each hosts an empty station platform with 

echoes from their tinnitus, inspired by applause for the sell-out prior to

the curtain-call, past the post-performance pub-crawl. on

the weary walk they exercise with a cape of shadow and a travelcard:

an artist is well accustomed to the costume of the moon,

conditioned by impulse to romanticise lethargy.

these aesthete dreamers enrich collegiate apathy, 

love on their lips for their prestigious stage savannahs, and

a preference for the pestle and mortar approach—with substitutions

of strings and a horsehair bow, of snare and struck skin.

They love this ajar world; critiqued by the papers, restored in the paintings,

tangled in the compositions.

© Mollie Mardel