Night Life

The late-night, early morning crowd
of twenty- and thirty- and forty-somethings
step and twist and sing and touch,
savoring each song with familiar lyrics
or a thump-y flavor to feel within them.
They drink and stare, they sweat, they yearn
to be pulled into the preemptive nostalgia
of living a night worth being remembered.

The introverted tag-alongs find their way
to the relative safety of corners and walls,
dreading this consequence of our social inertia.
We stand and sip and sing the songs we know,
waiting for the people that continue to dance
like they can't tell we don't want to be there.