Gideon performs “Head of State”

Gideon performs Head of State as a public act of disclosure: a poem that gives form to distress he had struggled to tell his mother about directly. The performance joins private history to public speech, revealing both the concealment surrounding his self-harm and the difficulty of asking for care. Its significance lies not only in what the poem says, but in the change of setting: memories previously held in silence are spoken before an audience, with Ava among those listening.

The walk to the stage

Gideon gets up from a floral lounge chair and makes his way along a path lined with people, who clap and cheer as he approaches the stage. Andy and Norma are seated at the front. One pats him on the leg and the other pinches his bum; he cannot tell which, but both are smiling and give him a thumbs-up. The small, affectionate gestures place familiar supporters in the crowd as he moves into the more exposed role of performer.

At the microphone, Gideon greets the audience and looks toward Ava. She is leaning forward with her elbows on her knees and her chin in her hands, her pinkie fingers between her teeth. He notices an unusually open smile, raised eyebrows, and wide eyes. Her attention gives the scene a personal focus within the larger gathering: although the room is full of people, the person he looks for is Ava.

Gideon gives his name, hears the audience respond with cheers, takes a breath through his nose, and announces the title. These actions mark a deliberate threshold. He does not begin by explaining his history; he introduces a poem and lets its language carry what he has not been able to say plainly. The announcement also establishes his authorship and presence before the crowd: he is not merely the subject of the story the poem recounts, but the person choosing to speak it.

What the poem discloses

Head of State is structured around surprise: the shock of a mother discovering what her son has concealed, and the speaker’s recognition that the discovery has hurt her as well as exposed his own distress. The poem connects his suffering to a period of depression and to self-harm, without presenting disclosure as simple or painless. Its central conflict is the distance between needing help and lacking the words to ask for it.

The poem describes the mother’s discovery as a moment that reaches both of them. The speaker understands that she wants to help and take the pain upon herself, yet that care does not erase the difficulty of telling her what is happening. Instead, the poem gives that difficulty a form: an unspoken appeal for her to notice, understand, and offer comfort. The repeated appeal to be picked up emphasizes how much the speaker longs for care, while also showing how hard it has been to request it directly.

Gideon’s account elsewhere supplies a concrete point in this history: he says the self-harm began five years earlier. He recalls a summer holiday at the Barrier Reef, where he refused to snorkel and stayed in long sleeves. Susan walked in on him in the bathroom. These details locate the poem’s family crisis in a particular memory, rather than leaving it as a generalized statement about pain. The performance makes the discovery speakable, while the earlier account makes clear that its consequences had been part of Gideon’s life for years.

Image, title, and public voice

The poem moves from concealment toward an image of the mother as a protective figure. Its closing movement imagines her taking authority over the speaker’s inner state, turning the title’s language of rule into an appeal for relief from having to manage everything alone. The monarch-butterfly image complicates that authority: the mother is at once a source of safety and a figure imagined as capable of entering the speaker’s mind. The poem’s ending therefore does not claim that public confession has resolved his distress. It gives his wish for help a voice and makes his dependence on another person visible.

The contrast between the poem’s ornate political and natural imagery and the plain circumstances it recounts is part of its method. A family discovery becomes a matter of state; an intimate need is enlarged into a public address. That scale shift does not make the underlying experience less personal. Rather, it lets Gideon approach it through crafted language, allowing images and repetition to carry what direct explanation had failed to convey. His breathing before he begins, and the poem’s movement from shock to appeal, also make performance a physical as well as verbal act.

Ava and the audience

Ava’s response is presented through Gideon’s attention to her face and posture. He notices a smile unlike one he has seen from her before, alongside her intent, forward-leaning pose. The narration does not explain her thoughts, but the detail makes her listening consequential to the scene. Gideon performs before a crowd, yet he registers the response of someone whose recognition matters to him.

The applause and cheers establish a receptive public setting, but the scene does not claim that applause can repair what the poem reveals. Its importance is narrower and more concrete: Gideon speaks, the audience listens, and his private history is no longer expressed only through concealment. In the larger narrative, where Ava also writes slam poems, his performance places poetry in a shared space of self-expression. Here, however, the subject is specifically Gideon’s own history and his relationship with his mother; the poem becomes a way to reveal that history without reducing it to a spoken confession.

Place in Gideon’s public performances

Head of State is one instance of poetry becoming public action in Gideon’s story. Later, at graduation, he is announced for an untitled piece and walks onto the stage before an audience of more than a thousand people. Ava watches him, and the response after that performance is striking: she realizes she had been holding her breath, sees that others are stunned, and is left crying as applause breaks out. The later scene is distinct from Head of State, but it echoes the earlier movement from a named poem and personal disclosure to a performer standing before a crowd.

Together, these performances make the stage a place where what is difficult to communicate privately can be shaped and offered to others. Head of State is especially revealing because it makes Gideon’s concealed distress and Susan’s discovery part of the poem’s subject. The performance does not promise that speaking will settle the pain; it shows a change in what can be acknowledged. Gideon names the work, takes the microphone, and lets an audience hear the history that had been difficult to put into ordinary conversation.