47. I like to party

I like to party.
The alleys of the mind
ignite,
corridors crammed with
Cirque de Soleil.
Dancers set ablaze
the brainstem;
Acrobats paint
this Carnival.

I like to party:
as do you;
together, we in fantasies
could speak in tongues,
but you:
in banal stupor,
drenched in booze
and music BLARING
escape
in your own prosaic
way:

but – I rather think,
I fly higher:
the trapeze is not enough for
me –

Special Note: This origins of this poem has a unique and strange origin.  I am a biomedical science student, forced to take a non-specialist English course for an elective.  The irony is that I actively write poetry on a daily to weekly basis.  Our professor introduced us to poetry on Monday, asking everyone to write a line of poetry on a scrap piece of paper.  He asked selected individuals to read their lines...my fellow classmates came up with the predicted horrendous things, such as: "Roses are red, violets are blue", "I am not good at poetry", etc. The line that stuck with our professor turned out to be the seemingly silly "I like to party."  He sent us an e-mail later that night, claiming to give someone a cash prize for transforming the first line "I like to party" into a poem.  Was it cheating that I accept?  Undeniably, yes.  Hence...I wrote this poem on Tuesday and e-mailed it to him.  On Wednesday's class, he noted that someone went "above and beyond" his expectations and that from now on, whenever this person was seen, they were to be referred to as "the first winner of the first annual English 1--- poetry competition".  He put a print-out of my e-mail on the document camera and it blew it up on two ginormous screens in front of the entire class.  To my horror, he then proceeded to spend a full 30 minutes of our 50 minute class praising and analyzing the poem word for word in front of the entire class.  And at the end of the dissection, the entire class applauded and I sank into my chair, exhilarated and thrilled, but mostly emotionally exhausted, thoroughly embarrassed, and overwhelmed.  The entire time I felt cold and I was shaking involuntarily...it was the strangest thing, like watching people trampling over my dead body or witnessing a live dissection of myself while still alive...fascinating, and really weird.  This is the first time, really, that my poetry was taken out from my personal quarters and disseminated with the real, living, breathing "public" - face to face (instead of through the impersonal Internet).  By the end of the class, I had the feeling that no one had read the poem the way I intended it to be read, but that it had taken on a new immortal life of its own, running rampant in a thousand different directions...I think the strangest thing is that I have never experienced any of the things mentioned in the poem - booze, parties, Cirque de Soleil, etc.  And now everyone thinks I'm some schizophrenic alcoholic.