Dancing with Dickinson

suppose she was in her day
a gothic girl to the last
likely to deny what didn't fit
what could be shown and still
have a life of safety and security
and someone to be but in
any case what she knew was
that love and death dance always
because she watched, wallflower
as ever. misfitted, corsetted,
becoming flamboyantly hidden
in the camera obscura of the sign
of the meaning. wrapped in the shuttered
embrace of whalebone, stifled half to
death in love unseen untouched unwrapped
only in the privacy of women and
the always unknown unspoken touch.
she speaks to now in me that
solipsistic lisp of sex and sense
but what does it say to be
ever still always watching
approaching death dancing a
careful waltz with and make
romance with the idea of abstraction
and loss of self and submission to
something sublimely social in its
embrace. still my dreams lie still
wrapped in layers of constraint and strange
recipes for the bitter taste of
morning missing a much needed u.
And I may dance the brazen but
it's a show yet unseen ironically
and perhaps I can make myself unwritten by
writing it down instead of living it
but never being seeing
between the lines until I'm safely
ridden away with the man in the long black
coat. And even now I dance
with Emily, becoming ever more
the victorian lady in a house
may be on a mesa, untouched
all the same for being different
wrapped tight in the embrace of
these lines of restraint offered to
almost anyone who'd listen but
always also only to no one
but shadows of a future self
who lies in state and whispers
of herself but as lies because only
lies leave us safe
as houses.