I’ve always had a thing against performance,
and I think this is because since a child
it was the performers
who made my life difficult for me,
who hid things behind a cover story
of melodrama and seduction.
This I think started with my mother
who, a very beautiful
and charismatic woman
who seemed to radiate joy
like a cocaine addict radiates frenzy,
always had something charming,
praiseworthy and melodramatic to say
or act out to everybody else
and at just the right time,
including to courts and doctors and
anyone who might question
the authenticity of her lip-licking defense,
which is something I often did
being a precocious child
with tenacious curiosity
and a high verbal IQ. In truth,
behind the scenes my mother was
mainly an irrefutably flawed and tragic
torturer of children and adults,
and that was the impactful story,
the one she never told
and used performance
to hide the dilemma and memory of.
It’s why to this day, even though I know
some performers are doing some
amazing things for art in general,
attending a play makes me feel dirty,
and why spoken word, slam poetry,
and dance set to poetry etc.
makes me want to run for the mountains
and remember how many times
a poet I was watching
recited their poem live,
tripped over a word,
then corrected themselves
and kept going,
sparing us the flattening quality
of a retake.
I think it’s also why I naturally gravitated
toward autobiographical poetry
and memory narrative,
sure, to discover myself and all that,
but really to reclaim a power over
the slap-and-go, cold cock of
performance still holding me
across a right hook in my own life,
mainly through unrealized boundary
dynamics imprinted onto my own mind
by the codependence between
my abusers and I
that never got fully resolved
or failed to meet justice, which to me
was always simply, a thing
being seen through
and made to stop acting.
It’s why mostly the movies I like to watch
include characters who are openly
self-effacing and unenthusiastic,
ones who are a bit disgusting
and depressingly boring
and confessional,
whose actors appear not to over-act
or over-perform.
When they are like that
I can at least stomach them,
as I find it’s easier
to suspend my disbelief
when the surface-level reaction shots
meant to make up for
lack of texture and depth
are minimal at best,
and when the movie from the get go
immediately surrenders to itself,
and seems to say, scene after scene:
This is the pancake of subtext
I tried so hard to not show you,
but I’m not sorry to disappoint,
and you can take it or leave it, because
that bad taste I left in your mouth,
because of how I foreshadowed
myself constantly,
and buzzed with unmerciful
predictability and clear understanding
at the cost of offending you,
well, sit on this: I may not be interesting,
but at least I was painfully honest.