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Do you love your words
in the heat of passion,
in the frenzy of lust,
in the cold moonlight,
in the close juxtaposition
of sound and echo
in the halls of memory,
or do your words just lie
in the caves of unwritten desire?
Do they dwell in still, small spaces,
the heartbeats of the firmament?
Are they your children,
innocent, playful, incongruous,
dressed in gingham frocks?
Do your words have buck teeth and pimples,
are they shy and nervous,
do they shine through tears?
Are your words
all fingers and thumbs,
staccato stabs at utterance
tapped out on keys,
unlocking a new language with acrimonious brevity
that profanely screams its love to God. Oh, my...!
and lolls and rolls on floors in laughter,
as idle youths will do?
Are they born in wealth and beauty,
or do they struggle, as beggars on the street?
In need of love,
either way.
Are they words of courtly love, outpourings
of medieval beauty and verbal foreplay,
or do they stammer like a palpitating heart
that's long on passion, short on art?
Are they blunt
with the Saxon brevity of fuck and cunt,
or is theirs
the long lascivious flow of copulation?
Do they talk and pray
or stalk and prey?
Do they drive you to despair,
a firefly hunt in forest gloaming,
rustling through an alliteration of leaves
upon the forest floor,
leaves that conceal a still hiss of sibilance?
Do they flicker briefly with a forked tongue,
or speak their truth bravely?
Do they fight one another,
ungainly elephants that trample grass,
or do they wallow like thesaurus wrecks,
drowning in seas of dead language,
dragged down by the barnacles and bladderwrack
of scholarship?
Or do they traipse through meadows,
carefree and blithe,
inhaling simplicity and toxic air?
Are your words robust,
driving chariots of fire across the sky
to stir new life
from the crustiness
of this old and wrinkled world?
Are they siren words to coax seafarers,
or siren words, wailing
as they cut through traffic
raucously,
racing to hospital
with your cold hands grasping
against the ebb tide of death?
Do they conjugate and sing,
stretch the syntax of the known
to seek new fields in which to lie
watching leaves spin, and wondering why
such life of pulsing green
should turn vermilion and scream
against the storm,
then drift down
to rest
in peace?
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