By Dionisio D. Martinez

It is no longer a question of balance and yet
we dance to keep from falling.

We dance because the rough
surface of the moon has carved a hole in the dark.

We dance on the beams of our unfinished houses.
We were dancing when our real houses

vanished and our lives became this.
We dance because the thin European found

a piano in the hall and dragged it
into his room and we had to celebrate

the way he dragged it in by himself
and the way he hacked at the keys like mad.

We are still dancing, still celebrating.
we dance with the ghost of Sid

Vicious in the elevator.
We were dancing before the murder.

We were dancing in the lobby when we heard
something and we all

felt a sharp pain and we thought it was only
our tired and reluctant muscles giving

up on our bodies. Now
we dance for the limousine driver and his family,

we dance for the genius, for the man
with a hole in his head, for the one who has

lived here forever.
We dance for every song ever

written about these rooms.
We dance full of vertigo looking

down from any window above 23rd Street,
we let ourselves

go like scarves in a confused wind. 
We will be dancing after the man with

the hole in his head has burned
perfect circles though the soles of his shoes.

We will dance on the broken bones
of our feet. We think

we can go even as ghosts, as angels looking
down at the blessings of 23rd Street.

We climbed the stairs dancing
the night of the blackout when the elevator

stopped. This was long before the ghost.
We still dance when we climb

and descend the stairs. We still
use the stairs because we like the romance of it.

We’ve danced through every modern war.
We dance

each night after the last club has closed down
like a war no one knows how to end and all

that remains is a scratched record and someone
humming and the inevitable piano

and all the lost angels in the halls.
We will be dancing when the last

angel cuts his own wings off and tosses them
up at the moon and jumps like another

blessing from any window above 23rd Street.
We dance in spite of gravity and the failure

of perpetual motion, in spite of the sleepless
angel of mathematics.

We dance the dance of those who speak
in tongues.

We dance like shadows
of puppets in someone’s clumsy hands. Sometimes

we dance with our own clumsy shadows.
We dance to keep from falling in love with

the lives of the strangers we
picked when the lights went out. Some

of us lit candles. Remember? But this
was after the fact. In the dark

we had changed partners and now
we found ourselves clinging to strange

new lives. We knew
that it would be like this from here on.

We would dance
and dance, hoping that through friction

or obsolescence or possibly even perfect 
balance we would rid ourselves

of these lives. This, at least,
was hope that kept us dancing.

The truth was something else. We knew
that we would change partners again

and again like bums trading stolen
goods by the light of the small fire they’ve

made in the aisle of an abandoned Pullman.