Grin and Share It

The night’s a maddening whirl as I sit on a table
and my friends dance and expend themselves around me,
hurling themselves wholeheartedly
into the present;
who cares about work tomorrow,
that’s in the future,
this is now
now is here
here is everything.

An inane immovable grin on my face
like a drugged-up Cheshire cat
beaming on the people who define my life,
I’m a poet and I want to write it all down
but I can’t because I’m in the moment
and it’s all so fleeting
that if I pause to compose
it will have already dissipated.

I reach out and touch her hand
and we clasp them together
as if to survive some tectonic force
and we would
and we’re so strong, we’re people
we’re friends
we’ve just met
we’ve known each other for years
and we can be anything that our hearts choose to define us by...

We’re raising this roof way beyond its foundations
and we’re pounding these walls outwards
because we can’t be confined by anything
and we’re life itself
and life itself is everything we’d always hoped for
and nothing can ever go wrong;
we’re immortalised in our own memories
and tonight can never be recounted
as anything other than the pinnacle of splendour,
skin on skin and heart on heart,
challenging the world to look us in the eye.