Upon the closing night of a mutual opus

                                 —And so,
the curtain falls, the play finished.
The audience surges in ovation
then prepares to depart.
Some will question whether it was right
to set the play in motion at all,
as the ending was too dismal for their taste
and you could see it coming at curtain rise.
In a perfect world, others would argue them down
from this position, for what is the point
of acting if it doesn't come crashing down
at the end? But the critics will always
have their say, and the world
will turn.

              —But for those actors,
the earth temporarily ceases to move
as the weight of the world
crashes back down upon them
with the final fall of the curtain.
Time meanders, unravels. A clock
is a wall hanging. The hour is a color
and the minute a smell. Do they
hate their lives in that first instant
of solitude after the accolades
subside, for not being what
they were so callously, abruptly
ripped from?

                    —And though
the best acting pair in the world
foil one another so succinctly
as to be the keys unlocking
the path to each other's acme,
one decides to go solo, to seek out
another mate. It's good to branch out,
he says, and my agent
would never accept us
spending our lives together,
playing these scenes over
and over. He wants what's best for us,
you know.

                —But they both know
that this is their epitome,
their song for the ages, their opus
and the one thing for which their lives
will have mattered at the end. Both
will spend their careers poring over the
arts & leisure section of the paper,
absorbing critique and balancing it
secretly against their early success,
burying their creeping despair
that what both knew would come,
came to be.

                   —But it'll never be forgotten.
The photos are still there. They've faded
from the front page, but they're archived
patiently in albums at the back. And those
who attended the show will always be able
to say, I saw him as the charming prince
in that play, and her the lovely princess,
and they worked so well together,
though he turned into a villain
in the end.