egress from a brightly lit land (part 2)

bonfires to
dance around
singing in your underwear with painted slang runes on skin

you sing your elders
you sing for the lost skincracked molecules of friendships
for the couple on the bus formed around their infant like a forcefield
you sing for what you admire and in the sarcastic face of what you condemn
you sing farces that make light of your insipid and self-absorbed struggle
you sing for absorption spitting cachaca into the blaze
hair whips like a bucking loa soulspanking jerky movements
you sing stupid haircuts
bonfire as panopticon
restless in the center of your own surveillance
you sing calm and croon self-destructing questions
you sing explosions back into themselves as cat claws
you sing consumptions and empty threats
sing old lives that emerge from the heat as nickelodeons animated underneath each error
sing subtitles for each wrongdoing
sing roadside secrets and grand admissions

on the edges of your society we post gypsy tent towns
permanent camp on the borders of your disgrace
we eat
we eat for the first time in a long while but in the dim lanternspace
we eat as if we remembered

there are sounds that emerge from the roads
reminding us of exile and half-confident promises and
the taste of poisoned waters warming
scars reminding

it is quieter here
with those sounds soft and distant and constant and
somehow beautiful
in the darkness the echoes conjure pleasant hallucinations or memories or shadowy dream material
and we recall crippling dangers with humor and pained laughter

we would not trade this night
for all the certainties
we left
behind