You've all heard the music. Why didn't you dance?

My muscles are sore with life, and I keep wishing that evening were here and that it were warm, that it were clustered over with high-slung vines of stars, twisted chains of fire in the night.

You've all heard the music. Why didn't you dance?

I would hope that the kitchen window would gasp and tumble with the scented thrust of breezes from the gray skin of the bay. It would salt the fumbling children in the streets between shadow houses; it would salt the lips of chestnut women gliding from velvet-shaded cars; it would salt the opaque red wombs of the clouds hanging like pulsing, pregnant, somber lullabies, softly now, over the streets between shadow houses.

You've heard the music. Why don't you dance?

I breathe the chestnut women gilded in dresses the colour of cool moon eyes or hot moon blush on evenings when empty cobwebs whisper between wind chimes. I breathe children with fervent dreams scorching up their hurtling limbs. I breathe sweet and hurt and want and the gossamer shaded membrane draped across the earth and the dead sun and the stillness of the porch and upon the pale shoulders of frail music throbbing through the tattered screen door. This is what I have been and shall ever be.

You've heard the music. Why aren't you dancing?