there's a secret place i found to keep my fear to hide my tenderness & be vulnerable -- it's next to the smallest bones in your inner ear the fluid skin blanket of your swooping neckline lily-soft & somehow stiff enough to break open my seed-pod heart
the one i thought no one could pry apart but with rosebud ******* -- lips -- the figure of biblical magdala takes me away from a lone satsuma tree raising its shriveled offering from the crippled earth on sunday strolls through duckpond parks kicking cobbled streets of augusta block or scooping water at me smiling in cutoffs on a hot hometown riverbank
you came to me on barefeet out of the smoke & rain silence where i was invisibly sobbing where heat-lightning waltzed sneaky-pete over the prairie & what are you if not a rain -- a zephyr flowing through stone temple just as the dry-mouth dog days of summer brought hell's fire across the southern field
so i've abandoned the hermetic existence & buried my old dead shell with a harp song hail glory to the contortionist god vaulting off the balance beam in the back of my mind beneath the rain soaked topsoil of dawn among the mound palaces of ants & mourning mud hornets while the gray shadows of the magpie dance & writhe on the mosaic faces of the trespassed lupine forest
& the sun still comes up on time big gold fluttering like a delusional cicada over the empty pink street i'm still fidgeting because clouds with tails like jellyfish sting with rooted memories of azaleas but you kiss away my all my latent restless gypsy fears & keep the harsh light dimmed or wrapped in heat-foil in your front dress pocket & you only give it back to me in brief drips -- pinches -- wet tongue kisses -- we talk with our eyes as only animals can our butts in the damp sand beside the breathless sea where streaked clouds seem free to finger the horizon but are cut by the city skyline -- a switchblade