The BlueIris Semi-Nightly Poem Thread, 10/14/07 Bonus

"The Warehouse"

Last prom of the year was juke-box powered in the blacked out cafeteria,
everyone idling, preening, twirling crepe flowers and endlessly complaining:
No smoke, no drink, can’t get stoned or laid on a kitchen steam table.
The jukebox choked down an hour of quarters intended for condoms
before the first hip-wiggle, so I zipped up my face and thought about the dog:
everyone wanted to do the dog because dance was a conjugate for fuck,
a full dress-rehearsal for maybe the first undressed Yes we'd get.

But our square steps described a warehouse of boxes in which we shuffled,
stiff-shouldered, one to a box. We wanted out bad, but when some guy twisted
free of the conveyor-belt rhythm, all the teen machienery stalled
as his body shook the invisible flames from its hair and fingers.
We bumped a little as he leapt and limboed to a spasm on the linoleum,
radiating a heat that was shameless, impersonal, absolute,
until the vice-principal shoved his matchhead under the water cooler.

The specter of the last dance freed the rest of us to spin and grind and slam
as though we'd gained the force to throw off carnations, aftershave stench,
ROTC, home economics, student government, and be done with dancing
and deliver the glow of our acne-bitten bodies down dirt roads home to nothing
but pines and crickets and stars, each of us looking for a darkness big enough
to swallow the car and all that could be done in it, driving slow, slower,
stopping. Shifting into Park. And then the laying on of hands, the body's prayer:

Show me out of these rented clothes. Use me. Use me.

—Robert Hill Long

I hated school functions. I didn't go to ball games or dances or participate in clubs. I did the bare minimum to get by. I guess I was a loser, but from the looks of that poem it doesn't appear as if I missed out on much.