I Will Live for the Groove

Our bass guitar stands body up, its headstock embedded in desert clay. This is not the sword that can’t be removed. Its only companion is a door with windows, a door that keeps nothing in or out. The sun is down to its last wax.
 
This is our new video, which runs on whatever we can burn. We throw old-time film on the bonfire, listen to frames of happy-looking people pop. These happy people used to tap dance in black and white at the wrong speed.

We don’t know how we got here, how we got to the middle of the desert, why we must play our instruments on the edge of a canyon. We don’t know what’s plugged in or what we pantomime. We know we are feeling it.

Our funk, our words, they sound like the crack of taps on marble, the percussion of smiles. When our music turns to ash, we replant the bass in the ground, walk to the door, look through the windows for the other side. We hear strings tightening, the reaching of roots. We know:
We will disappear.

*Title is a lyric from “The Sun Goes Down (Living it Up)” by Level 42 (#10 on UK Singles Chart, 1983).

  

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