Saint Paul, 17 January 2005
Dance clouds must be an oracle's concubine
Uncertainty, ground mist below immeasurables
Standing up to the un-reckoned crescendo
Absolutes burrow stumps like ants in rot wood
Until your dance card is illegible chicken scratch
Browbeaten two-steps bellowed by windbags
Coalitions of simpletons decry temptation's ball
Siren songs silenced long before shoes danced
Our elders condemn a waltz but also assure us
Abandoned women make the best dancers
The river might be good to you. The calyx
Of a rosebud might hold everything
Needed to nuture the perfect flower. Yet
A two-seven off-suit is no ace-ace pocket rocket
So when asked to dance, shimmy like an eel pout
Notes:
Abandoned Women the Best Dancers is a chapter in
the anti-dance treatise The Ball-Room to Hell
by T. A. Faulkner (1892).