The Game Room

Lyrics

Another evening settles in the bones of the house.
Up here, the air is thick with polite fictions.
Time to go down. Down where the rules are simpler.

Leave The Study, with its ledgers of quiet desperation.
Door closed on the maps of where we were supposed to go.
I turn my back on The Drawing Room, can't stand the ghosts of conversations I've already had a hundred times. A performance of a performance. Not tonight.
Down the main stair, then the narrow flight behind the kitchen.
The air cools. The smell of dust and damp stone rises to meet me.

Down in the body of the house.
The low hum from The Furnace Corridor is a constant, sleeping animal.
A flicker of light from under the door of The Prohibition Bar… another game, but not the one I’m looking for. That one requires an audience.
This is different. This is geometry and silence.
My hand finds the cold brass knob. A turn. A click.

And here it is. The great green rectangle of felt under the low-hanging brass lamp.
A perfect, silent world waiting for a push to set it in motion.
This is the table. The only honest stage in the whole damn mansion.
No words needed, just angles. Just the weight of the cue in your hand.
Just the clean, hard logic of the collision.

Chalk dust on my fingers. The scent of it, drier than any book in the library.
My father stands over there, by the rack, in 1947, lining up a shot he’ll talk about for years. I am a boy watching from the doorway.
Later, I’m a young man, playing for a girl's attention in 1973, sinking the eight ball too early. Her laughter.
On the wall, the dartboard is a mosaic of tiny holes, a record of near misses and the occasional, startling bullseye. Every point on the scoreboard is a lie we agreed to tell.

I line up the break. The fifteen spheres a perfect triangle.
In the polish of the cue ball, I see the lamp, and in the lamp, a smaller version of this room, with a smaller me, lining up this same shot forever.
The crack of the break when it comes… it has the exact, bitter taste of gin spilled on this very floor in 1928. A sound you can taste. A memory that isn't mine, but I claim it anyway.

The great green rectangle of felt under the low-hanging brass lamp.
A perfect, silent world waiting for a push to set it in motion.
This is the table. The only honest stage in the whole damn mansion.
No words needed, just angles. Just the weight of the cue in your hand.
Just the clean, hard logic of the collision.

The colors scatter. Red, yellow, solid, stripe.
They find their pockets, or they don't.
The game plays itself. Always has.
I rack them again. For whoever comes next.