Howard Firkin
This dance—this tapping on the keys, these hands
exploring you, exploring thought, defining
words defining you, the words refining
your description: adjectives and ands,
the nouns, the punctuation—this dance kills me.
Each tiny insect heart pulse, micro beat,
amoebic movements, lashing flagellates,
these dot and dash flash scraps of meaning, cognates
of the universal, incomplete
descriptor dance notation—this dance fills me.

Where are you dancing now? Today? This minute?
Who else holds you in body or in thought?
I thought I watched the dance and wasn’t in it,
but everybody’s watching, dancing, caught.