Coming Down Aisy

You GOT this!

I CAN do it and me Da has a Bon Scott flat cap.





Coming Down Aisy
___________________________________________


I blew in the door looking like I just woke up from a field circa 1974.
My tangled hair is standing on end like I may have crawled through a hedge to get out of abovementioned field, as although I have been showering daily, I have not brushed it.
It's my Patti Smith look, apparently.
Also I am wearing enough eye make up to take to the stage in the West End as Cleopatra, which I re-apply with shaking hands at every, and all opportunities -
mirrors of parked cars
mirrors outside the gents
tiny lip gloss contacts.
Why am I so bothered about my eyes?
What is with the layers of liner and lashes?
"You're looking very windswept tonight" says Eddie as I slide my black coat off and onto a stool, in a seamless move I am no stranger to.
In the preparation for Shellshock I was flat out batshit.
I micro managed every last detail and was informed sagely by an advisor the next day that it is possibly not a great idea to expend every last ounce of your energy in the minute details BEFORE you perform for 3 hours.
I don't know where the energy came from, nor why it has not left yet.
It's like somebody flicked a light on in my brain.
"You have NO off switch" shouts hewhomustnotbenamed as he threw his clothes into a bag for the thousandth time and I watched him and his long legs leave.
Again.
In the writing and performing, comes the therapy of memory, the laying bare, the stripping back of the onion layers of the self, and in that honesty comes clarity.
But at a price.
Their lips move but I can't hear what they say.
"Comfortably Numb"
I am listening to the sounds of another time, other voices, I process what is happening in the moment only many hours after the fact.
And usually when I am reminded.
I am speeding so fast I can barely breathe, I can't keep up with my head, stuff is fired everywhere, and yet I can't sit, or relax or sleep.
I need to have 51 conversations urgently and immediately.
I am thinking your things as you are, and trying to see out from your eyes, to inhabit your skin, in the mania of creativity and it is outrageous that 
I can't bear the laughter to stop, and the quiet peace come back in and put it's feet up by the fire and say hello, old friend.
Papers are interviewing me, photographers say hold it - hold on.
Hold on.
The messages move me to tears daily, the calls from strangers, the emails.
The phone, computer, doorbell and dog are mental.
And in the whirlwind of Michelle,
who is shrieking like a tornado around a Minnesota barn,
hovers the calm presence of the real woman,
looking out serenely from within the eye of the storm.
The eyes.
There is a reason she masks her eyes, as they are the windows of a very tired soul who is "Coming down Aisy".
I looked around the empty bar with tired eyes and left as quietly as I hadn't come in.


M.D.M. April 25th

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