Dancefloor
Posted by Sruthi Sadhujan (Alumnus) | Filed under '08 Spring: Vintage, Poetry, Print, Show Poems
A group of fools gathered around in a nightclub,
A dimly-lit, red-toned dance floor blur of moving figures,
And silent thinkers nestled in corners far away from the light.
The smoke that curled from their table-ridden cigarettes floated upwards,
And mingled like cosmopolitan debonairs near their foreheads.
They looked old…
With all that grey in their hair.
But when the music started playing,
They shook out their shoulders
And the atmosphere shuddered for a moment.
Then the bass moaned slowly towards them.
And they all leaned in a little closer.
With no introductions, the melody slipped under their fingernails
And took flight through their bones,
And suddenly everybody was throbbing against the beat,
a pulse in a giant wrist where the stage was the heart,
and the aisles were the veins,
and everyone trembled with their cigarettes
glowing like traveling constellations in the galaxies.
Unfolding like tents in the desert, the music unraveled to them,
And behind them they left all their cares,
With them, they took their heartbeats and drumbeats and impassioned feet.
It caused their eyes to tear, dismantled their fears and with the remains,
They reconstructed dreams…
Until they were miniscule and they were giant,
The music was the breadth of the universe, and it was a string of it,
It was the implosion of a white dwarf, and the collapse of genetic walls,
They were all at once human, and they were the gods.
This is what the music did to them,
Until everybody was everybody,
‘Cause everybody was on the dance floor.
The dance floor was everyone,
And the dance floor was the earth,
Sanity slowly filed out their ears in pencil straight lines
and the night air was brazenly calling them,
Until they were ready to lay themselves to sacrifice.
They wanted to peel their chests open,
Remove their hearts, and transplant this beat as their life source.
They dropped to their knees, kissed the dance floor.
Yearning like rows of shivering worshippers reaching for the high.
They touched their foreheads to the ground…and waited.
And this was how it happened:
Finally, this is how each and every soul was lifted out of its confines
and taken abreast on the wind,
This is how, like serpents shedding their worn lives,
every dancer danced straight out of his skins,
And this is how they ran clear into the arms of the next world that was patiently waiting for them,
In the final and shivering pause, someone murmured and it was done
They had bridged purgatory, the land and skies were finally one,
heaven and earth were threaded onto one string.
They took a last leap,
as feather by feather, the music carried them, the music built them wings.
