It’s staggering

The darkness

With red light, green, and yellow.

But that glow

That stop and go beat

To the retreating of day

The goons come out

No longer petrified

We are the night.

We are the darkness.

We are the colored lines

That the daytime uses window blinds for.

We are the black liquid fire

That ignites all the hot toddy

Engines

The ones that beg to get their heads kicked in

To the music,

Just to groove it,

Where her lipstick is a dark red,

Wine-stained

Cheeks pink where he rubbed his hand

Spanked.

Bent.

Liquid liner cat-eyed.

Flying.

Striped shirt with a little green

Pussy-bow tied around her neck.

Snaps her fingers.

Snap, snap

Tick, tack

A rat, tat, tat

We’re those poets and those singers

and those painters those lip-whispering angels

Snapping photographs from black and white

And we are those midnight dancers.

We are the darkness.

We are the ones.

That you’ve been begging for.

The ones you think of when you’re all alone.

Because we got the passion of a thousand men.

We’ve got the humility of a hundred more.

And we have all suffered.

Homeless man on the sidewalk strumming til his fingers go numb.

That girl spitting up paint so bad that her artwork will sell while she’s dying to get famous.

That comedian who makes jokes about his sadness.

That dancer who spins around a pole on a moving train.

And she captures it all.

Pops it out from her camera.

We are the darkness.

She has immortalized us.