One Shoe Off

Bubble up, bubble up,
can't keep joy in a paper cup.
(pop-pop)

Five-forty. Tuesday. The fire alarm goes.
Four hundred of us out on the street.
No coats. No bags. Half a sandwich in my hand.
Security says twenty minutes minimum,
in the voice of a man who has said it before.
Rain that isn't really rain.
Nobody wants to stand in a doorway looking sad.
A legal man in a see-through shirt
pretending hard that this is fine.
A whole floor of us, no coats, no plans,
nothing to do for twenty minutes.
Then a kid from the third floor, a phone on a bollard,
volume all the way up.
The song is one everybody claims to hate.
Nobody stands still for it. Not one of us.
Half of us know the dance from a wedding.
The rest of us are inventing one.
The woman from payroll, who never speaks,
takes one shoe off. And starts it.

Shake the worry off your shoulder,
(off your shoulder)
let the bassline be the cure.
Twenty minutes on a wet pavement
and nobody's going in.
(nobody's going in)

Bubble up, bubble up,
(bubble up)
can't keep joy in a paper cup.
(paper cup)
One shoe off on the wet street dancing —
let the alarm keep ringing.
(keep ringing)

Pop-pop, don't stop,
(don't stop)
heart like soda to the top.
Pop-pop, don't stop,
(don't stop)
one shoe off.
(one shoe off)

By minute six the building next door came out
to see what the noise was, and stayed.
An office is a spell. An alarm breaks it.
Everyone remembers they have a body.
The bus can't get through. The driver does not mind.
He's filming it out the window.
Somebody's boss dancing extremely badly
for eleven people who report to him
and Thursday nobody mentions it
and everybody remembers it forever.
The alarm was a faulty sensor on floor two.
Best faulty sensor in the history of this city.
The bus driver put his hazards on and stayed.
A woman in a tabard came out with a mop.
The mop did nothing for eleven minutes.
Twenty minutes minimum, security said.
It was forty. Nobody corrected him.
A paper cup went round as a drum.
An umbrella became a microphone.

Shake the worry off your shoulder,
(off your shoulder)
let the bassline be the cure.
Twenty minutes on a wet pavement
and nobody's going in.
(nobody's going in)

Bubble up, bubble up,
(bubble up)
can't keep joy in a paper cup.
(paper cup)
One shoe off on the wet street dancing —
let the alarm keep ringing.
(keep ringing)

Four hundred people. One phone on a bollard.
Twenty minutes that turned into forty
because nobody wanted to go back in,
because the rain had given up trying,
because payroll was still going.
...Twenty minutes. (twenty minutes)
Faulty sensor. (faulty sensor)
Best day of the year.

Friday I sat in the car by the kerb,
engine off, unable to walk in.
Tuesday the alarm walked me out
and four hundred people showed me
what a street does when nobody's in charge.
I danced one-shoed in the rain
with a man whose name I never got.
Best meeting of my career.

Bubble up, bubble up,
(bubble up!)
can't keep joy in a paper cup.
(paper cup)
Twenty minutes turned to forty dancing —
let the alarm keep ringing.
(keep ringing)

Pop-pop, don't stop.
(don't stop)
Faulty sensor.
(faulty sensor)