An addict of experience
always fiends
for significance;
she wants
every gesture—needs it
to be special.
If forced
to stand outside
the interpretive circle,
she will struggle
to understand
its simplest implication;
but when driven
to participate,
the most byzantine ritual
will snap to its
grid and make
unblemished sense.
As if under hypnosis,
she will dance
the proscenium,
miming gifts of daffodils
to imagined eye-
witnesses
and bending
to the floorboards
with a slow somber dignity
to press her soft lips
to the corpse
of the past.
For her, even the darkness
which concludes
the performance
is considered to be both
highly referential
and important—
because,
of course, it's
the exact same dark
which she felt so compelled
to dispel
at the start.