The beat echoes through your chest,
banging against your ribcage until your
bones crackle—each rupture steady,
like your strides into your very first birthday party,
just before somebody
gags on your shirt.

Sticky backs plaster against yours
as you nudge through the crowd,
eyes roaming for a discernible face,
ears listening for a stable rhythm.
A stumbling girl elbows you in the waist,
jabs a purpling bruise into your flesh.
She doesn’t apologize, only laughs it off.

As the speakers blare and
the bass sloshes in your ears,
solace hums in the whining synth-pop,
on the trembling dance floor:
fragments of fleeting youth,
glass shards that’d only cut your hands
trying to piece together.

So you sway in the sea of heated bodies,
the thrill of the age twisting into your veins.
The melody lurches, like your insides while dancing;
piano chords strike behind each lyric like the
strobe lights flashing across your flushed skin,
brighter than anything else
you had ever known.

And when the boombox’s pulse
at last shudders to a stop,
the singer’s voice trails to a whisper —
so does the rush.

Maybe there was beauty

in the mosaic the glass shards formed:
in succumbing
to the mess
of becoming.