instructions for dancing

A fast dealer comes with it: turn, slide, best the whistlers; and no more trotting, fox. Pucker the scent. It’s just toe led. It’s ripe with rare polish, tapped and spun un-dizzy. Unpeel from the pack, inward, with time out to whirl, or lunge 18-wheeler wild sighing into slightness. We have steps one through a million, here and on the slicker floor over there, there. Worry sleeps. A pinch of life in it, still. Tackle and reach. Hold and sway. It muscles your way into spots of light, speckled silver, drips of fashion turned from lick into split. Bump holy. Trip softly. Joints gone to jelly, tide the rip of you with lack’s dazed nonchalance, or smoke whatever comes next. Follow boxy shadowing hops through shipwrecked ankle into terpsichorean battle pitched just out of sight. Bow, if they let you, in the custard-colored light. Hips first, follow less-than-through. Tie yourself to another, take another take, and slither backwards, if the thread of it all lets you slink off, or chase what’s not behind, ever. Keep to cacophony. Rule out any other’s rhythm. Crumble to the floor. Be stranger than you’ve ever thought to be. Be absurd. Slower horses to the rescue, you’ll retreat when there’s too many more. Don’t count. Don’t refrain. It is darker than seeing and louder than you’d hear. Necessary, at least costly, in the mirror shaking, rolled useless and bounced in, a flail with flair, top-sure and bottomed to the ceiling, moved under, lost. A ruin just up ahead? Go with it. Scar the sky with heel smoke. Sing neon. The spot’s gone. It’ll be up to being down from here on in. Tongue the groove with seizure-whipped sleep. Take somebody else’s name. Tuba along with the rest. There ain’t a thing wrong with you a couple of whiskies won’t fix right up. Set off the burglar alarm and call Benny Goodman. Step out of line. You’re done.