Somebody Shot Ray Richards Tonight

Illustrated by Ella Clayton.

Today’s play:

“The Murder of Gonzago or, The Mousetrap”

“Somebody shot Ray Richards tonight”

Yesterday…was I sitting on the roof of a crystal palace

seeing air, fire, earth and sea pouring over me?

Between the white and yellow lights of a living city

a sixty-year-old actor rises and sails across the stage.

His rusty body bows at the audience staring at his cage,

while spotlights caress his face, old and gritty.

There was a time he used to enjoy

being a lonesome pretender.

But merciless winter wrecked his splendour,

crushing it down below the walls of Troy.

Now I recall what happened that night,

when red-chested swallows talked to the shimmering 

tune of moonlight, asking her to whiten their feathers;

when the morning dew slipped out from my tongue

and came through the ceiling of this golden hall.

An iron jungle, a concrete cage

where undone shadows wander in ecliptic obscurity…

I could have made my body roam

through the empty streets of a sunless sky

that bathed the marshmallow houses.

I wish I could have drowned in the lagoon

where glass mermaids sang day, night and noon.

They say I have always been ill, very ill.

Standing ovation in some forsaken place,

beside the West End lights,

praising Ray Richard’s suit

 whose right sleeve laughs; whose left sleeve cries.

In the distance I saw a yellow land

where the building walls turn to paper flames

and the clouds were made of clay.

The edifices crumbling, falling above the moon.

This plastic floor moving with the speed of

a sinking ship stormed off a waterfall’s edge.

The rustling echoes of dead voices told me! It was not my fault!

They whispered in my ear… They told me to do it.

And a million shady eyes trapped in a crystal cage.

I took my pen out, turned over the page,

looking for the man standing on the stage. [Heartbeat.]

An ink-stream that will forever rest in this verse. [Heartbeats.]

His dead heart shrieked; mine stayed alive, though still.

Ray Richards collapses with a red stain in his chest

on his white, fragile suit

as the tide rises to this verse’s pace,

over the fragments of Ray Richards.

I wake up in the morning in this palace made of glass.

No darkness. No light. No stars.

The police said: “We know it was you, though he was in your head.”

“But that’s silly!” I said. “You cannot kill who does not exist, can you?

[The beating of his hideous heart]

When I touch my nakedness, I feel the itch of red ink

on my white, fragile suit.

and lose sense of time and space

when my own pen stabs my chest.

My right sleeve laughs, my left sleeve cries.

Standing an hour upon the stage,

half-alive and half-enduring a disease called age,

I witness myself in the mirror aiming at my own reflection.

[Your sighs. My gaze. His life. Your face. My eyes]

And they said I had always been ill, very ill.