(The poet is wearing a mask) Tonight we shall appear with no more presence than the blood and flesh of a poet... We will return from the dead, but not from beyond the grave, for we have none, nor will we surge from the underworld, like Orpheus, as we lie scattered in one of the four elements: air, water, earth or fire, perchance, under the weight of an enormous silence-like a stone. In fact, no one came to our burial, only our executioners bearing no flowers, saying no prayers, and, since for them we are still mere phantoms, tonight, among you, we wish to be no aparition, no blithe spirits moving a glass along numbers or words on a three-legged table...or a ghostly light on a TV screen. On the contrary, to make ourselves visible, even more human, we wear this mask, for every mask allows us to be behind this other that speaks... and even if these words will one day become a poem buried in a book or one more spectre in the Internet, tonight we conjure up the player, not the reader, thus, becoming once more, before you, only the voice, one more voice among the voiceless... (The poet takes off the mask, and a white mask is reveled underneath) |