Something about Ysabel's Dance

In the new hotel on Fiesta Night

The staff are bored;

Donna Ysabel dances, zombie-like,

The guests applaud....

The colour is local,

The tourists are tanned

The natives are restless

And everything's second hand.

Places disappear, but the names endure

As alibis;

Memory's hazy here, no one's really sure

Of how time flies....

Well drunk the bass player

Cries into his beer -

Are Yzabel's mother

Or Yzabel dancing here?

After hours all the couriers are in the bar

Round the corner

With the drivers in a game of cards...

In bursts Ysabel, her hair let loose,

Her limbs set free;

On the tabletops she's dancing to a memory -

Conversations stops and every eye

Is turned to see...

Something about Ysabel's dance.

It's a shrinking world, it's a fun-packed cruise,

A museum trip:

Skirt the native girl, check the rabid dog,

Rejoin the ship.

There's no Charlie Mingus,

His Tijnena's gone...

This smile for the camera

Is all just a tourist con.

But after hours all the couriers and drivers know

Of a cantina where there's every chance

That she might show, and maybe Ysabel

Will dance the dance for real again,

Her mother's footsteps, vice and virtue,

Lust and love and pain.

There's something here

The anthropologists dare not explain,

Something about Ysabel's dance