Your Lover is an Actress

He undressed me beneath the stage.
I danced the roles of the actors above,
feeling the emotions from my eyebrows to my toes,
naked with sadness of thirty years of womanhood.

I pleaded for fairness with the fullness of my pouted lips
and scorned ex-lovers with the curves of my breasts;
were it a comedy I would not have laughed,
a tragedy I would not have cried.

It was a saga of touches and turmoil,
a soliloquy of a woman undone.

Under the dress rehearsals and stage directions, I lived it all.
I exhaled the rawness with swift bends of my elbows, a sway of my swelled thighs.
He admired me because of what I had felt,
what I was capable of feeling.

He watched my body move like a wooden bow strains to make music of strings -- and it was a beautiful sound of rain and dishwater.

I bowed and he applauded. Above me the curtains closed.