The Old Projectionist

The pictures. I've never owned a camera, except one of the
disposable kind. Perhaps, if someone had bought me a genuine
camera, I might never have written a song or made up a story.

The pictures I am talking about are the motion pictures that
run in the empty cinema through the night, when it's only me
and the old projectionist alone in the dark empty theatre.

When I am lost inside the moving pictures I don't notice him,
except when he coughs. Once in a while I'll lean my head back
and see the curls of smoke floating in the cylinder of light.

Near dawn, when the first bus wheezes in the street outside,
he will stop the film. It's time then for both of us to go, leave
the theatre to its fabulous darkness.

He must go quietly out the back way, for though I take my time
leaving and sometimes linger a while by the posters out front,
I have never seen him.

Perhaps he lives up there, in a room filled with reels.
Perhaps, after I go, he puts on one last show, for no one else
but himself, alone.

DL