rave sketch - toilets

Lily, who sidled away from the bubbling beacon

at the middle-left of the progressive stage

stands on a sawdust island in a sea of

mud, spot-dancing

in swansong darkness or signet morning –

no stars, aurora’s iced confection  

or town with its LEDs, that windowless room.

to pummel her

there’s no pneumatic heartbeat so she’s numb

she’s light as a feather – taut strings keep twanging

where see can hear them, even see them. even to

hold out her hands to hold them like

               mana or fireflies. even to

               note the soundlessness

as if all the noise in the world got suckered to the dance floors

in the long queue full of costumed antecedents

in the long queue full of costumed forerunners

in the long queue full of costumed super-temporals –

the smell of shit is

the smell of sewage now. deeper, wind-flared

corporeal. quarantined – everyone quarantined

by kissing their addled failure

to engage, by the sense that they

and they alone are blameless.

humiliated – everyone humiliated by the urge

to shit eclipsing all cosmologies, all care –

plots on a sprawling timeline

collapsed in, swept over an event horizon

swept over the downturned side of a moebius strip

waiting for one of the fifteen plywood doors

to unlock, the half-random sites of

isolation worth the isolation.

universal law has ceased to apply – nothing’s moving, my door

flaps open and shut someplace different

someplace further afield, and Lily travels there

before simultaneously

three are empty, three await her.

how to choose between them? maybe the integrity of

the lock, maybe the dearth or profusion of the

paper, maybe the height of the pile beneath the commode.

maybe the seat’s uncomfortably cold

or warm in such a way that she feels watched.

are people watching her deliberate now? and she’ll need

to take her whole outfit off to go!  Lily doubles back and

sidles away again,  abhorring the high and the human.