My friends are in the background like - 

Evening Glitz & Glam

Clubbercise

It’s 03:37am on a Sunday morning.

My ear drums are still reverberating with the echoes

of the music, sound waves elongating into memories I will try

and fail

to find words for.

My legs ache from the subconscious work out of clubbing:

I can hear my thighs’ cries for recompense even though it’s been over an hour

since I last moved.

My calves, taut, every tendon stretched to the point of breaking

only to bounce back, a cassette tape

with the music unreeling.

Yet I told one of the several

very attractive

men I danced with,

with the kind of unerring confidence that only comes with drunkenness,

“If I am this big, and I can keep up with you,

then Lord knows you’d better keep up with me!”

And he laughed, kissed my cheeks, held me close,

told me I’d made his night by dancing with him. Thanked me

for being a laugh,

and in that second I wish I’d been one drink

drunker,

had stretched for his lips - forbidden fruit

women shaped like me barely dare to dream of tasting.

And my friends tell me afterwards how every man on the dancefloor

who’d seen the way I moved

came to them and told them how well

I could fucking dance; how the rhythm

made a home out of the shell of my self confidence,

how the music brought the life back to my body,

and how the light emphasised the mirror that is my eyes.

And as my neighbour and I make our way home,

her conquest wrapped up in my coat and me

making conversation with the taxi driver,

I think.

Let the deafness continue to hammer away at my ear drums,

impress the memory of the night into my skull.

And I realise it doesn’t matter.

They are all stories to tell,

and the echoes will continue to stretch.

And the feel of those hands, all grateful

not to be alone in their expression of themselves,

will leave their marks,

even if they’re only for me to treasure

and remember.