After the Apocalypse, I dance all night in the Make-Believe Ballroom. The vast dance floor is a swirling vortex of almonds, and as I spin around the Circle of Thanatos, I clutch my chimerical dance partners, gaze into their empty ebony eyes, and search for a glimmer of soul.

Tick tock. Tick tock. Tick tock. I rock ‘n roll and do the Stroll in front of our black-and-white TV, whirling and swirling to Dick Clark’s American Bandstand. I’m a kid again and free in the Make-Believe Ballroom until I see the grotesquerie.

Exotically hot and sizzling like Nathan’s french fries but cooling off in Coney Island waters, I become a cold corpse with a raw chilling rigor mortis, passing and slithering through merciless metamorphoses.

After the end, around the bend, I discover a baroque ballroom. I trudge across a seething threshold of deep snow and ice and enter.

Now, I peer through the thousand masks of my false self. “Hello,” I whisper as I whirl around Eternity. The susurrations of my real self murmur “Goodbye.”

After the Apocalypse, I dance all night in the Make-Believe Ballroom, caressing illusion, kissing Chimera, a nonbeing, swirling in nowhere, a once-upon-a-time genuine member of the species homo sapiens, transmogrified into a true-blue corpse, and perhaps, a meandering ghost sailing across Eternity’s dance floor searching for a glimmer of soul.