Walking With The Lights Out
By Leah Kelleher, Age 16, Essex, VT
Dancing tip-toed along eerie streets,
the sky charcoal
like the asphalt beneath our feet.
Step forward to the beat,
the pulse of our hearts,
our hearts to the beat of the ballad
and our fingertips raised up to heaven.
Floating on the night,
its shoulders carrying us away,
away from time that ticks without
a moment’s glance at its victim.
We are the victims,
the misfits who accept the insufferable reality that the stopwatch will break,
and our fingertips will descend down into the earth.
That our secrets will dissipate,
our smiles erase,
but we don’t ponder the inevitable.
Instead ... we wake the restless dreamers
with loud thumping feet.
We laugh at lullabies, removing our ear buds so that the world can hear our anthems.
We walk with the lights out,
our footsteps submerged in darkness.
We shout with voices that echo the silence,
and we lose our minds,
escape our bodily prisons for a moment.
