There’s vague imagery of a sore stomach, sipping apple juice at kindergarten; your sickness’ unsuspecting genesis. Skip your breakfast, what do you expect? And I'm so very tall now.

  Think of singers, of performance that’s gorgeous, that would rile your envies did it not seize and gouge that aspirant tissue of the soul just to bear witness, to be a part of the silver-tongued spectacle, to rave with the millions and join your arms to the uptake, to screech in a party’s praise, dropping acid at the amusement park. The homeless artistry, the groupie roulette, the romance of a blending feature. My performance hurts the neck, bends the spine. The room’s quiet before and after, and in drift from the keyboard you suspend your illusions, waitlist whatever purpose your frantic tapping grasped at. You share and pocket some congratulations, but you taste in their eye that they couldn’t give less of a fuck. Only one dances in the writer’s chair, and it’s an awkward adjusting from thigh through to hip. You want to clutch that handsome otherwise, get it under your nails, profess to all through ink that it’s yours and it’s experienced.

  We’re lined up for a concert. Aggression. Unrelenting rhythm. Gathering itself, and we’ll be spent thereafter on bars. Baggy clothes because they’d need a pat-down and they’d never be able to justify it, then we’re in and we’re waddling and searching out a spot. Crowd’s amassing and eating even the outskirts. Revelry’s gobbling us up. Eventually the chin’s throbbing, we’re digging for the front. It’s ecstasy’s oil painting, it’s a kiss under wavering club-lights.

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  Our sodomy, self-justifying somewhere through the vapours, through the forgetting, and we call it dance. You live in the causeways of “probably” and then there’s certainty, gritty and screaming. In the brush of bodies, the mob-love, it’s blurry and blinding and it’s all painfully clear. And maybe you belong, but we all go home eventually.

  “You know this song?” he shouts, over the hiss of a chorus' betweens, hearing the screech I meet to every syllable.

  “I love this fucking song!”

  “I’d listen to this every goddamn day on my way to work!”

  “Cheers you up?”

  “No! Distracts me!” The crowd shuffles. He’s wedged away from me. “That’s why we’re jumping, isn’t it!”

  There’s a joke in there somewhere. I can already hear the front door shut, the lock click, the quiet returned. And these are strangers, and this is memory, and the dance leaves knots in my ankles. We’re all envious of the rockstar. People thrash to their stories, shut their eyes and picture a place in them. When we’re gone, the equipment’s packed away and the litter’s picked up, and you’d almost believe we were never there at all. Never happy. Never alive. We’re not together, we’re waving at an intersection and all the roads wind up in their own special nowhere. Suppose you’re a runner no matter what shoes you wear. But the radio’s there, at your hip or in your ear or on the dash, and it blasts.