your fifteen minutes . . .

your typical filmic and phantasmagoric fifteen minutes of personal fame

"can i be filmed dancing, kate?"

there my body is water and metal, sound and fury,

and i've been told

by some boy

at some party

somewhere.

once.

that my aura can be seen through

the conduits of my arms, the commitment of my flesh to the will of rhythm

and light, the contact of my palms with

small plastic cylindrical containers of fluorescent chemical compounds.

she's making a documentary

on club kids

and dance culture. (she always had a way with images and ecstacy.)

and her winking lense could blink

twice as fast, as sharp as the average epileptic;

her boredom three times as quick and hip and hot to boot

as the common fashionable narcoleptic;

her fine,

thin, birdish nostrils suck up coke four times as powerfully as the leading

supermodel.

but those days are over, she grins.

"wiggle your way yonder and wink for the camera, sweety" she says.

bass in my ears and my hands on my ass,

i studder, shake and undulate before her, and her contraption.

one rockstar

to another, part pornstar by design, one hand aligns one mechanical eye to another

to ever be immortalized on independent film.

"celluloid is the new medium of this, our third millennium

and cinema the old marketplace of desire," i quip cryptically. sarcastically.

the sentence trips off of my tongue like summer thunder.

a thread of sweat

rolls from the nape of my neck to the joint of my collarbone. "can i take you home?!"

shrieks the ass hole with the cellular phone in the corner.

but it doesn't register til later

when the lights come up and nothing else matters but that

there i am,

still dancing:

and unashamed.

written 4.28.00