21
even with the soft black weight of all my mother’s
disapproval, I will love watching you dance.
in a nameless, shifting somehow, it reminds me,
the way your hips twist, and the way you walk the line,
of the mirrored table or the pipe, the tablet and the pill.
I drink all that whiskey, and I see your god,
to whom you’re dancing, and I know his name:
his name is not my name, but in those simple seconds
I am him, and we can sway together till my drunken feet
collapse – dispel the myth of dancing. in Babylonian ruin,
I am tumbling down the steps of self esteem
and breaking my body on those building blocks
you keep to culminate a future in which I am not.
still I’ll watch you dance, and I’ll forget to call my mom,
and she will cry, remembering how when I was just a child
I would barely scrape my knee and cry her name.
now, I am more than broken, and I am more than young.
but even with the freedom I’ve received, by grace of generation,
I am unhappy. I would give a full ten years of life if I could skip
my gory twenties, and escape my mother’s first regret
that these are empty years, and I am still her son.
but I am so drunk. and I do forget to call. and I will watch you
dance until your skinny legs have swallowed every fear.
and that is my defilement of my era’s greatest gift:
that I promise, (and with my mother’s blessing,) to forget.
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