Dancing or Not Dancing (Poetry Marathon 2022 – Hour 12)

We can leave
Anytime
After we smile
And dance
The sun and moon
Are of no consequence
Indoors climbing
Towards a destination
A place never been
Never seen
And if they smile
We smile back
And if they wave
We wave back
We turn trumpets
Into words
And words
Into flutes
They are wind instruments
And won’t mind
The transpositioning
We hold our hands out
And dance with strangers
Each to our own rhythm
They are strangers to us
Not to others
We were invited
Someone invited us
To join in the jamboree
I only know one dance
And one move within that dance
But you know more
You know how to sway to multibeats
These strangers can enjoy watching
You find the right flow
Time no longer matters
After a drink or two
I need those drinks
To calm down
To be involved
To lower my inhibitions
But it doesn’t help me
Find the dance floor
It doesn’t help me
Find the beat
It may even make my dancing worse
You’ve seen me dance
You’ve instructed me
In a fine technique
I cannot understand
How to move a figure eight
I move my feet back and forth
Pretending to follow you
But I am off by the time
It takes to figure out what you did.
Whenever you’re ready we can go
Whenever you think we’ve been here long enough
They smile at us
We smile back
They wave at us
We wave back
We weave our way across
The dance floor
We hear applause
For someone else
Not for us
I don’t know if I really want to leave
I am unhappy either way.