The Whisperers

Are you attracted to those with quiet voices,

soft speakers that make you lean

closer to hear their words? Their breath

beside your ear, they will not amp it up

because they know you want to listen: those,

do they bring the iron in your blood

up to the surface, creating bumps,

creating tingles, blushing thumbnails?

Do the stentorians push you away

with the gusts their lungs create?

Do you crawl on bleeding palms to reach

these whisperers, unconsciously self-confident,

shyness turned to charisma, like

a closed rose you know will open in the sun,

or even, naively, under a reading lamp?

Venus of Willendorf

She dangles

from your pine branch,

porous thighs generously slabbed,

her eyes germinated, her braids, her hands

small and forgotten and grasping.

You never touch her in anger,

but anyway her fat

would act

as a cocoon.

Soon

her shrine will crumble from decadence,

weighted down by gold, by lard:

spitted, rapidly charred,

her hoard

will melt and resolidify into wax,

her skin cracked.

Easily, reverently, she will be

ignited.

Black Irish

Your limbs are choppy: elbows that stutter,

and nervous, Morse-tap knees. They spell

our names in Ogham, incomprehensible.

And your eyes have been rinsed out again.

I should have guessed. You have mislaid

your ragged-winged umbrella, your mascara,

again, and I think again you lost your rings.

Crow, rasp your resined bow so that my down

jumps on edge, my teeth raze my words and then

we intersect again. This macadam, it begs

our cataracted soles, the starless scrape

of our cab's brake, our fingerprints, partings.

Sometimes, when I want to say something that I care a lot about, it's hard to physically shape the words and push them out of my larynx and oral cavity. It's like my body wants to shelter them, kind of like they are an egg that I want to lay but its shell isn't on yet. My body will only let the words out if the shell is on the egg, that is, if the words are protected by misdirection and not saying exactly what I mean. Because that protects the emotions inside, which are the yolk. I don't know, but it's hard for me to say things when I really mean them.