Chasing Dreams

Originally written in April, 2007. A poem about wanting simple things.

 The music pulsed throughout the room.

I can feel every beat of the subwoofer down to my bones.

My body moves and flows with the music—

rocking, swaying, pulsing, falling.

Sweaty bodies surround me, minimally costumed,

slaves to the music just like me.

All of our limbs entangle

until the start of one body and the start of the another

becomes an abstract and absurd idea.

We’re just one moving, pulsing, living, sweating, being.

           

My hips begin to circle,

my arms rise into the air,

my head falls back and rests on a stranger’s shoulder.

My mind—for a few minuets at least—

Stops thinking, stops working, stops caring.

The only thing in charge is instinct.

The primal desire to become one with the mass.

To seduce, and be seduced, by the stranger behind me.

Nothing matters but this moment,

a moment of bliss, a moment of music.

 

Suddenly the song ends,

and the music—my beat, my temporary life—

Dies into the drone of voices.

The stranger behind me leans in to whisper in me ear

“Do you want to get a drink?”

and the moment is ruined.

The anonymity, the freedom, and the excitement

fades into dreams, and reality comes back.

The stranger isn’t an impartial being.

He wants something, and thinks I must want the same.

 

After all, no one just dances to dance,

No one dances to become one with the music and forget.

Everybody wants something,

too bad I can only get what I want in fleeting glimpses,

too short to be sure they even exist.

“No—No I think I better go.”

Without even a glace to the stranger

I run for the door. Three blocks,

and a thirty minute wait later, I’m once again dancing,

and constantly chasing glimpses of a dream.