By Clara Elizabeth
If you are going to dance in the community ballroom
To a different tune than the others
Do so with eyes wide
Do not be blinded
While you swing with your known neuroses
Do not have only eyes locked with the delusion of your own
While you waltz
Do not listen solely for your cues and beats
While the orchestra brawls beneath
You must be able to hear the others’ whimpers
While they stumble and halt
Missing choruses entirely
Their dancing is not as gentle as yours
Yet you are still just but half way
Between their dramatic drunken fumbling
And your instructor’s spritely prance
You should not dance so openly in the community ballroom
With meditative abandon
In a clumsy, half-evolved step
Still entrained to old grooves
Unless you feel the function of their drunken funking so intimately
You can twist and swing their jive into yours
Lest others
In inebriation
Read your nimble ecstasy
In their signature of time
And believe your rhythmic ricocheting
To be a tribute to the junkie jump they are stoned on
It is for a similar reason
That it is not good to chant mantra in the washroom
The deafened in the stalls believe you make gossip
They become less likely to taste that they are trapped inside their own mouths
Supplicate to your instructor
Beg to feel their footsteps in the coarse carpet of your mind
Beg to feel their profoundly grooving rhythm by the pumping of your blood
Beg to feel their kind hands pull your waist back to balance after every nauseating,
off-beat spin
Since you seem to be held in the frozen claw of perpetual movement
There may be a chance
The beloved dancing yogi
Will teach out of sweet mercy for all beings
The ballroom mirror winks and smiles with a woeful jig
There is a message for you in your own shimmy
If you are taught to sashay to the beat of your own flighty, shifting breath
In a ballroom blasting booze-bombed loops
Aural Ouroboros anthems
In a key of asynchronously experienced thrills
You must dance with eyes so open and empty
The drunks see through the hollow handle of the soul
To the melodious and enchanting discotheque
Housed in the only warehouse:
The awakened mind of uncontrived open space