Narrow Rooms

(this is an imitation of Mary Jo Salter. I was given the idea by her poem "Goodbye, Train")

I'm standing in a narrow room
packed with adolescents or college-age
kids, arms-crossed, T-shirt-wearing,

staring at the stage like animals
restrained. But when the band comes on
there are no leashes or cages left.

There are open-mouthed snarls, hackles raised,
but not at each other. We are all angry
at the same thing. We all have our reasons.

The narrow room turns into a river overrun
by frothy, heaving rapids.
The kids who get caught up collide

and push off again, hands on on backs
or shoulderblades. Some of them are carried
to the front of the room and collect there,

a small, frantic mass that steadily loses
its constituents to the current. But more arrive,
flung over top in absurd and reckless flight,

held aloft and then borne groundward.
This is not the time to hunker down.
This is the time to stick out my neck

for someone else's knees to clamber on.
(I'll support them on my shoulders.)
I will be one of them. The singer comes down

from the stage. He, too, is caught up.
This is the point. The bars and barriers
are washed away. We are all bruised

from collisions with hands and elbows.
We are all sweatier than we've ever been.
We will all lose our voices from yelling so loud.

I think about how lucky I am to be eighteen,
angry and battered by rapids, instead of silenced
and subject to the gentle predictability of the tides.