On Saturday nights, Ginsberg’s Club was a flurry of smoke and rage, and tonight was no exception. Dean sat at the bar, contemplating the weekend’s ultraviolence. He marveled at the sight of it all; a boundless ocean of young bodies, convulsing to the whirring rhythms of anarchy that roared and slithered–music into throbbing eardrums, vodka down blazing throats.

He took a sip from his drink, turning, at last, towards Daisy, who had stopped trying to fill the hollow silence with conversation and proceeded to cram it with the smoke of her cigarette. When they had first started dating, he’d notice this unease and feel a sudden pang of guilt. To him, silence was seldom uncomfortable; still, he had hated to watch how she racked through her brain, fumbling for empty words like she was afraid of what her thoughts would tell her when her voice went quiet. After two years of this, he simply ceased to care.

“What do you think of the place?” Daisy inquired.

Dean stared at the crowd. He heard her, but realized the music was so mind-bendingly loud that he’d get away with pretending not to have heard. Reprimanding himself for this all-too familiar brand of douchebaggery, he shifted his chair to face her directly.

“I think it’s the best goddamn place I’ve ever been in. Do you feel it, Daisy?”

He smiled after asking this, closing his eyes and willing himself to submit to the music’s gorgeous throb. Daisy closed her eyes, too, struggling to feel the music with any fraction of the vitality that came so easily to Dean. She smirked, and leaned to kiss him. The pressure of her lips seemed to rise and fall in tandem with the music, and Dean basked in the glory of the universe’s calculated chaos.

He pulled away, then, and everything was good. His mother had always said Daisy smelled of honey and cinnamon, and the intoxicating taste lingered on his tongue for a while. It faded after a while, as it always did nowadays. He looked at her, then, vibrant and familiar, and his heart sank; for the very first time, he’d noticed how much she’d changed. How much they’d both changed. Daisy took another drag. When did she start smoking? It poured out of her mouth and nostrils in slender tendrils, reaching for him with a breed of wistful levity that made him want to cry.

They sat quietly for a couple of minutes, before Dean broke the silence.  “You know this place is named after the poet, right?”

She stared blankly. He went on.  

“Allen Ginsberg–he’s one of the greats. Ever heard of Rosal?”

Her eyes searched his face, scavenging for something–anything–to offer up as a response.

“Is he another poet?”

“Yeah, he’s pretty dope.” He was quiet for a bit. They both were.

“You know,” he dared, “there’s this quote of his I think you’d really like.”

“How does it go?”

Dean fumbled around with his phone for a little while. After grossly excessive contemplation, he began to read.

“Any veteran of the set will tell you: if you let any two songs spin at the same time, there is a point at which the music will simply line up— if for just a moment, sometimes longer —and even when they drift back into their own galaxies of noise, one enormous arrangement of metal, wood, and space clattering into the other, out of time again, when the downbeats stumble into the gaps and breaks of another track, the two simultaneous grooves are what great dancers learn to move to, swing and stutter. You just gotta let vinyl fly long enough. You gotta trust the music. The body finds it.” Daisy sighed, and understood. She wasn’t very fond of poetry, but now the words pierced through porcelain skin and began their perennial course through her veins. The records span still, but the songs didn’t click.

“Daisy–I love you. I always will.”

“Me too.” She gripped his hand, smiling a weary smile, and felt herself drift back into her own galaxy of noise.