LIFE OF THE PARTY

You danced all night,

Avoiding the echoes of their words,

So you didn’t have to talk to them,

You loved it, alright,

To forget the fright of your life.

One day you wake up,

Withered, water-less, without any makeup,

And there’s no one to make up for what they did,

You blame yourself as you insist

that it wasn’t your fault,

They locked you in the vault.

In the maze of the sound waves, you lose yourself,

The light in the eclipse has come,

And it feels like spring has just begun,

You’re reborn,

A new woman?

Suddenly you’re the little girl at the party,

Looking around,

Eyes darting,

Mouth filled with sand you danced to the sound

Of psychedelic bubbles you didn’t want to burst.

And the crows look on above the corpse,

But they can’t see the open coffin that you have walked out of,

Out into the glitterball of life,

Where you dazzle and they frazzle,

Can’t bear to see the flaming candle.

The blazing candle,

And they wait for it to flicker,

But it never dimmers.

The pencils of their fingers reach for the warmth,

Whilst the rubbery words try to erase the yolk,

The wax drips down into my eyes,

Milky white droplet lies,

Fitting when we were in Bath,

But they cool eventually from the

altitude of the pedestal you placed me on,

The hill you insisted we walked on.

Like the Madonna,

I knew you were gonna lead to something magnificently terrible,

Or terribly magnificent,

The rose and the serpent,

Twisting around my ankle and up the hills of my thighs,

You found secrecy in the coves of the candlelight,

When you turned off the lights,

And I lay there in doomingly apprehensive stage fright,

The little girl at the party,

Looking around,

Eyes always darting,

Mouth filled with sand I danced to the sound

Of psychedelic bubbles I wished would burst.

by Pippa Hill