VIEW ONTO A COURTYARD - 10
An ardent fan of period films, childhood
skips up the cinema staircase, heart aflutter,
to feast eyes on the dashing swashbucklers,
on the heroes’ wrathful beauty.
The reckoning of justice, the ideal gunshots,
convey the certainty that evil
has been surrounded in the gorge
and, with only two bullets left, is bound to lose.
The dim light in the theater fosters the illusion,
which dissolves amid the laughs that surround him
at the exit, where his schoolmate all agree:
you’re the villain, you can be the water boy.