Lionesses
They owned the floor, the night, themselves.
Summer of Love ’96…
Twenty years old, twenty-one months orphaned,
seventy-two hours swallowed whole by everything…
cannabis, acid, speed, oblivion’s architecture
brick by brick dismantling what remained.
Eight of us, one ticket. We still got in.
The campsite sprawled like a fever dream,
tents bleeding into dust, into sky,
days collapsing into one nameless now.
I wandered in complete inebriation,
a ghost searching for coordinates.
Then…
a bass note detonated from the dance tent,
seismic, pulsing, across acres of canvas and bodies.
Everyone froze like prairie dogs,
heads snapping toward the sound.
House music was here.
I stepped into a cathedral of throbbing bass,
hand over heart as girls crowned in glitter
set the floor ablaze with every stomp.
We cracked cans, smoked unknowns,
snorted shards off sweaty palms,
popped E like sacrament…
tiny suns dissolving on the tongue,
liquid mercy flooding veins,
ribs unlocking, animal loosed.
It wasn’t just the rush.
It was the permission.
Skin electric, nerves rewritten
to speak in pulses, in basslines
that fucked the spine.
They moved like the music had them by the hips…
devotion, then feral release,
hips rolling secrets no man could claim,
pleasure blooming inward, self-contained,
private thunder.
No shy smiles. No waiting.
They owned the floor, the night, the noise…
eyes fierce, laughter sharp as glass,
bodies saying this is mine
in every drop of sweat,
every shudder not meant for anyone else.
The fields became rivers of sound,
house hymns under feral skies.
Basslines braided into our veins,
their hips scripting manifestos
in sweat and motion,
in the shameless way they took their ecstasy
and gave none of it away.
Monday came…
stilettos, skirts,
combat boots traded for cubicles.
Wildness pressed beneath corporate seams.
Talked over. Talked down.
Told to shrink.
But I had seen them.
Seen them rise like myth…
hips sharp with defiance,
eyes open flame,
bodies still humming
with the memory of nights
when pleasure was power
and power needed no apology.
And in the rush of the morning train,
in glass and steel reflections,
I still see them prowling…
lionesses of the night,
unbroken.
— UpsilonA
Afterword
What this poem is really about…
Not raves.
Not drugs.
Not the amber glow of nostalgia.
It’s about the first time a young man saw women moving entirely on their own terms—unmediated, unshrunk, unobserved except by choice. It’s about witnessing sovereignty so unfiltered it rewired his understanding of power.