Mashing

We are young, passionate, and carried by a bass beat booming.

Yet I want to jostle past these gyrating bodies to the chilly damp trash dump for a while, smell the cold stink of waste rather than the too warm, too arousing stink of sweat and breath and human energies. This mobbish delight is blinding. I catch my breath and imprint the quiet on my ears the way I imprinted caught glances on my mind in dancing. 

Makes me want to laugh, the way I try hard to keep myself bound while losing myself to movement, to music. Forget without forgetting the real true pure in the stupid, stupid, stupid. What do I want to prove? That my body can move like anyone's? That I'm not afraid to be wild, to be free, to laugh in a crowd of costumed students shouting "Friday night!"? That I can be free in what may amount to slavery? Truly free to sway/jive/bounce for joy in a dance of sugar-high, this-is-what-fun-is-supposed-to-be?-young-people, dance the dance my little brother taught me, lose sexy to silly and be drawn to raise my hands high, not to celebrate youth but to plead violently, meekly, for Jesus in the dark ceiling untouched by disco lights. 

This makes me smile and press bandages on our arms, when the crowd boom boom booms and takes your money.

I can't stay for the next song. Just let me walk home slowly, letting the sleet beat against my hot face, allowing my numb feet to linger in chilled puddles, to only want to feel that clean sting. 

Can't help murmuring "forgiveness" to the lamp-lit trees overhead. These are they who rejoice in being just what you made.

In a quiet, dim room now, press my lips on those smooth, smooth pages, waiting open on my bed. Egypt was glad when they left.