Young Actors

Young actors
playing others
go home at night
to kiss and drink and sleep
and get up and do it again
tomorrow,
maybe with some shock or joy
at their faces appearing in the news;

but old actors
have a harder time of it.
When they’re done playing
they go home too,
but they’ve drunk and kissed
and slept so much already
they’re left with a yearning
only for tomorrow’s script
and to try to learn
what they couldn’t learn
when they were younger,

and they are rarely surprised by the morning news.

It’s not a good thing
or a bad thing.
It’s just the falling away
of distraction

in favor of one repeated question:

what’s next?