Unlaced Ecstasy: Surviving the Artificial Midnight

Let the cold mouths murmur in the grey squares.

They look upon your unmasked face,

they point their pale, careful fingers

and call your open chest foolish,

but they have forgotten the taste of the wind.

You are alive, sudden and unashamed,

spilling across the earth like crushed grapes.

​You dance, and the soil remembers its heat.

Eros shakes you—a mountain storm falling on deep-rooted oaks—

you desire the salt of the deep, the dark honey of the wild.

It is a vast and unquiet yearning,

an ache that pulls the heavy moon down to the sea.

​And what your hands take, you fill.

You pour your bright water into the hollows of the world,

satisfying the dry, cracked mouth of the afternoon.

Let them shrink from the terrifying glare of your joy.

​You are woven of crushed violet and solar flare,

shining like a wet stone in the violent dawn.

More than light, you are the furnace itself.

You burn, my wild one, you burn—

consuming the dry wood of their timid judgments,

a brilliant, unsparing fire against the encroaching dark.

Let the pale specters by the velvet rope

Sneer at your sweat, these mannequins of ice;

They sip their poisoned gin bereft of hope,

Calling your rapture an obscene device.

They are but phantoms in a neon tomb,

But you are free, and terribly alive,

A pulsing orchid in the synthetic gloom

Where only the damned and the beautiful survive.

​The heavy bass descends—a brutal god—

And you dance wildly on the sticky floor.

Let their dead eyes deem your convulsions odd,

While you thrash blindly at the underworld’s door.

You desire the crush of the strobe’s violent kiss,

The grinding teeth, the smoke, the humid air;

You yearn to plunge into the black abyss,

Drowning the bourgeois sickness of despair.

​And in this vault of artificial night,

You satisfy the hunger of the dark,

Pouring your blood into the flashing light,

A naked nerve, a sacrificial spark.

Let the cold statues of the barroom stare,

Repulsed by the wet velvet of your skin.

You shine amidst the heavy, throbbing air,

A radiant jewel of unapologetic sin.

​You do not merely wait in the electric haze,

A tepid ghost watching the hours turn.

Caught in the rhythm's dark, delirious maze,

My savage angel—you beautifully burn.

You burn the sterile judgment of their eyes,

A splendid pyre of flesh and ecstasy,

Ascending through the synth's descending cries,

Into a sick and holy sovereignty.