Hello, Audience

God, I remember when you were special to me. 

 You weren't just a smog of colour blowing dollar signs my way. Me, illuminated by your passion and you by mine. Now I am looked through whilst you commemorate the present with your fucking phone. No, I could see your faces. Seeing my mum in the crowd for the first time, knowing I could find her anywhere. Even as the groups became crowds, my mum managed to continue her lighthouse duties. She doesn't come anymore though, what's the point?

The teary eyes and the voice cracks that would plague my performances are gone. The goosebumps when you would finish my verse…now not even a chilly winter set can make my hair ten-hut. The memory remains, though. I can time travel to times better felt, presenting my creation back to me with equal zeal. You taking my lyrics and shoving them down your throat. Me, watching them gargle back up covered in your own histories. Both of our faces were ever-present.

 Occasionally, on stage, I can legitimately cry, but I am reliving another man's memory. It gets worse; I mostly fake it now. Slowly glance as I rotate around you as if I'm overwhelmed by your adulation. I'm fucking not. And, it isn't that I believe I am the embodiment of greatness or anything like that. I can't even tell anymore if I ever was any good. It is that you have become my routine. A fiver to me is now a fifty pence piece. Songwriting is now gifted, not grafted, and thirty thousand heads chanting my name is now a Thursday night. 

I have guilt over not being guilty. My chance to stop and smell the roses was wasted many years ago- success has a fleeting odour. Sometimes, on stage, I want to rip my arm off. Completely detach it from my body, hear the screams, actually fucking hear the screams coming from you. Hear you and feel me. That would be a nice change, a gasp contributing to my performance. A new collaborator penetrating an old ruin.

Back in the day, and I am old enough to say this, I'd cry instantly if I looked too close out to you. I wouldn't recognise faces, but I'd be overwhelmed by your rawness. Singing and staring at a stranger, you fucking weirdo. I'll admit, though, you did use to feel familiar to me. Nowhere near as familiar as I seem to feel to you, but I knew what type you were. Well, I'd guess, but it was comforting nonetheless to feel as If I understood you or at least some parts of your interpersonal conglomerate. Every time you would come up to me after a show dishing out compliments, managing to steer your steaming eyes into mine, I'd feel it. Man, I would feel it. Now? You wouldn't get close enough for me to hear you. Your touch, if you were lucky, would be wiped with soap before I even had the opportunity to ignore my awareness of your existence. 

 If I see the flash of a camera, however, then you best believe I'll return to my performatively humbled demeanour. The smartphone is the coin, and I am the slot machine. You all are my commander when your weapon is aimed at my translucent impression. Then I return to my role as the anonymously renowned benefactor to my own success. 

As I said, you're a smog now, and I am sorry. The old me is ashamed. 

Cheers