Run the Red Lights. Ed Skoog

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      I was always cast as Old Man

      with tennis-shoe polish for white hair

      and lines drawn where my lines now are,

      forehead haiku, the eyes’ briffits,

      and parentheses around the muzzle.

      I guess I miss it, achievement’s sense,

      the way a show’s run ends

      and everyone knows it together,

      a social pain, like the death

      of a popular imaginary friend.

      When lights between scenes dim,

      I like to see actors take props offstage

      or team up with stagehands to move

      the built elements of our fantasy.

      I hope they keep going, and sneak

      some of the properties home to mix in

      with their private dramas. I pass theaters

      the way I pass churches, but like

      better this foldable theater

      half-constructed in the mind,

      sometimes thrown away

      along with the day’s receipts.

      Nothing’s lost. I carry my own

      props in—red telephone,

      bowl of apples—and then with me draw

      back into the unseen.

The Children’s Theater

      One morning I’ll leave the house naked

      and stroll down the street, fun for everyone

      to be relieved from shame for a moment,

      nourishment for my inner scold.

      Most people I’ve seen, I’ve seen clothed.

      What anyone wore I don’t remember,

      while the people I’ve seen nude

      I remember everything about, or can I

      draw the first nipple I kissed by video light

      or the cyclorama of middle-school showers

      all of us in awful proportions, half-kid, half-dude.

      Classmates with the largest dicks

      have been first to die, by misadventure,

      cancer, problems of the liver. Still,

      most Swedes debut sexually at fifteen

      and in China it’s twenty-three.

      Everyone in this floating world is naked.

      I’m tired of having a body. The mind’s a bore

      too, with its video light. On their patio,

      my neighbors talk about their bodies

      in low voices while the bug zapper

      administers its anonymous questionnaire.

      Last week I went for an HIV test

      at the free clinic below the repair shop

      for musical instruments, also

      housing a children’s theater,

      and I could hear them improvising

      as I waited twenty minutes for my blood

      to signal the presence or absence

      of antibodies. The woman who

      administered my test and an anonymous

      questionnaire did not believe my story

      though it was both rehearsed and true:

      the gas station in Nevada, the basin

      where I washed up after hours dazed

      on the road bloody with a stranger’s

      inner life covering my hands,

      my face before I noticed. I remember

      going to the traveling show of Sweeney Todd

      in which my cousin Stuart, trained for opera,

      submitted his throat to the “demon barber’s”

      stage knife, sending his body down

      the ingenious chute, where Angela Lansbury

      baked him into pie. His only sung Sondheim

      was “a lavabo and a fancy chair.” Lavabo,

      from the Psalms: I will wash my hands

       in innocency: so will I compass thine altar.

      But it just means a sink to wash the blood.

      Whose blood? You don’t get more naked

      than blood. At the clinic, mine dotted

      a simple device to rehearse its speech.

      I answered her questions of history, sexual

      partnerships, gender, gender preference.

      Whether rough or high, or had traveled

      to any of the following countries.

      Behind the wall’s frank posters and the plush

      toy vulvas piled in the corner, some children’s

      play dreamed itself into being. We know

      without being told that theaters are haunted.

      They share with graveyards the whistling taboo,

      the seatbacks curved like tombstone tops.

      It’s the stage manager’s job to make sure

      a light is left on in that cavern when the last

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