It's not real, but when it comes down to it, neither am I.
Just a ghost, rattling round inside a tin can body,
just a collection of ideas inside a half-written book,
just an omnibus of the dullest soap – all the same stories with different names.
So I’m a ghost-girl, half-alive and half-anxiety,
and maybe it’s not real, who gets to decide reality anyway?
It’s real enough for me – orange brick and gravel driveway –
and it feels half like home because I’ve spent enough time there already.
It’s not real but it might as well be.
I can see everything that took place on the stairs,
in the library, in the cave, up against that tree.
I act it out like it’s fiction and I don’t mention
how it feels more substantial than my life,
more, ironically, alive, more connected.
I don’t mention it in the same way as I don’t say,
oh, Pat would love this, when we walk into the retro shop,
or voice that The Captain would enjoy The Needles Old Battery.
I have to pretend to be at least a little in reality, but still,
in the house, I’m smiling without doubting my facial expressions,
because I’m here, I’m really here.
I could stay there forever, but we’ve got a two-hour slot,
so I have my photo taken with Fanny and Dante
and I pull my real-person face with my real-person eyes,
and then I go back to the place where I pretend to be living, but never fully.
See, I’ve always been good at inhabiting two places simultaneously,
so I’m here and I’m there and it’s all as real as it needs to be.