Sample

Excerpt from “In the Shadow of the Silver Screen”

I was born into the cinema
And I never escaped
My father loved the silver screen
More than he loved anything else
In this small world of ours
Just as his father had before him
And in that lay his tragedy
My mother loved my father
Fully and passionately
That was hers
But as with most tragedies
That have blazed across
That great screen
In whose shadow I have lived
The learning came too late
I have no real tragedy of my own
Just a filing cabinet
Full of broken dreams
Not easily forgotten nightmares
And a set of memories that
Never really added up
To more than a badly written
And poorly understood script
But oh how they loved
A love so fierce and so wild
That it had no choice but to die
And now all that remains
Is this all but abandoned cinema
Four hundred reels of fading film
Fifteen red bills
And me
But I only exist to remember
And to tell you of
The greatest love story
That this crumbling building ever saw
My father was Tristan
But my mother was Juliet

Reel One

As this film starts
We must travel back
Many years
But not to the beginning
For that is beyond the limits
Of this script's remit
Outside it is a cold
Early winter morning
First screening is still two hours away
It must have been a few months
After my fourth birthday
I sat playing with my tin soldiers
While the great screen flickered
It's pseudo life giving
Our lives the only shape
And purpose they possessed
It's great stories told
To an almost empty auditorium
I already knew enough to see
That it wasn't really silver at all
But not enough to understand
That the silver in the screen
Was not a colour
But a terrible beauty
That I would come to understand
All to well when it was too late
To save any of us
For back then I possessed a kind of innocence
As I looked up at my parents
Those Gods of my young world
My mother looked upon my father
And through her brown eyes
Shone a deep, warm, pure love
That even at that tender age
I could not fail to see and feel
My father's gaze was held prisoner
By the huge, monstrous faces
On the screen behind me
By a love that was clearly as strong
As it was silent
As it was hopeless
As it was deadly
Before me my soldiers
Easily overcame all that
This tiny world I had created
Could put in their way
Because that was what the script
That my young mind had prepared for them
Demanded would always happen
It seems a pity that
I could not write my own script
In that same, tidy manner
I watched my soldiers
My mother watched my father
My father watched the screen
And the screen watched over us all
None, not even my tin soldiers
Would survive any of this.

Reel Two

And now for an oh-so traditional cross fade
Taking us swiftly but discreetly
To another station
Along the line of this journey
This one a few days before my eighth birthday
My mother is trying to hide from me
Her not so secret plans
To put some kind of party together
To celebrate my having strode
Another year closer to my death
My father is in the projection room
Still working on his book
Of the history of unreal heroines
That he has loved from that room
No words are spoken
Though the very air
Is thick with a silent dialogue
Which will never be heard
Or even acknowledged
My tin soldiers have long since
Been demoted and now lie almost forgotten
In a cardboard box under my bed
In their place is a loop of track
A tiny electric locomotive travels
Through the micro-scale world
Which I can fully control
And in which I know live
For most of my days
When my mother isn't trying her best
To teach me reading and writing and sums
Or we're all sitting in worship
At the altar of the silver screen
That supplies this building
And indeed ourselves
With our purpose and function
Our very justification for being
But even then I had learned
Not to trust Fonda or Clint or Bronson
Or even Scorcese or Leone
Because I knew that they lied
And that the screen was not a window
But a mirror
And that at least one of us
Was reading from the wrong script.

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