Cogwheel Ballet
by Odin Roark

Hot
Humid
New York summer
Industrial commerce 24/7

Textile scents of humid wool
Acerbic edge of chemical dyes
Permeating wood and air
Thick oily lubricants
Layered enslavement
Nowhere to escape
A century's senses imprisoned

Drawing on all he has...

One work-for-rent dreamer
Of agile body
Holds forth
Awaiting his nightly concession
His arabesque of glee

2 AM break
The precious pause for moonlight's silver
Thrusting its presence through
Floor to ceiling windows
Refracting off bare metal frames
Arcing visual life across the radiators
Curling over his labor station
Spreading across planked floor
His rough hewn dance surface
Awaiting...

From floors below
Dissonant seduction begins
Printing presses come alive
Rhythmic noise
Machinery's first chaotic movement
Changing its accelerated pace
Into allegro's process
Then back to a scherzo finish
The imaginative sounds
Many dismiss as noise
Even as others hear music

This crescendo of background rumble
Joined by circular rises and falls
Sustains the dancer's cocoon
His undaunted confidence
In iron cogs gnashing
Creaking gears kissing
Turning belts lathering
Pistons rising
Falling
Pounding energy
Echoing its creation
To the imagination above

Gracefully
He moves about the floor
Contorting his body
Bending into pain
Releasing into pleasure

But

Nightly sensations end too soon
Midnight shift perks infrequent
Labor's drudgery winning
Rendering body vapid
By morning's sunrise

Squinting at daylight

Infused with a Spartan workout
Of fantasized dream movements
Between lifting warehouse containers
His aching arms of no-questions-asked effort
Hang limp beside legs often of steel
Now mere precarious stilts to make it home