You gave me a language
creeping swiftly rushing gushing verbs –
I’d heard it countless times, its fingers at my neck —
its rhythms dreams I almost owned
until the sun whipped up that same-old same-old.

Flesh, I know. Stories dropped like stones into the sea-sky
call me home. And you, you know them too. I was there
when you dangled your pendulum
head to head, all the way from bar to bed.

We called it romance. We called it love spit. Plucked from our mouths these green fleshy flowers, these houses that glowered knowing they would most surely outlive us all. And I,
so swept up in psalms, bridles, reigns, I almost forgot

that this love has nothing to do with ceremony.

It must’ve been an inflection
that made the sounds sour, stern
as the knot that carried your bones to me.

I thought, maybe, maybe our story has no plot, just trappings of exquisiteness – lopsided
mountain ranges and seven-pointed stars. I thought, this love is half bird and half law

it’s up and over, shredding air bubbles like in-betweens. They said we were wrong, but they applauded anyway

and they will still for as long as we stay cute and femmey and promise not to much
make a fuss. You and me, we found unknowns of our own and wept not out of loneliness.

These worlds you have given beat with a wild extravagance, a verve, a Greek chorus mad dashing through the whirl of some limp-footed parade.

This is the world where
I love you too much. This is the brute heart that beats yesterdays to fluff. But we didn’t call it annihilation, we called it Romance.

7.19.09