Chimera Song Mosaic
Wednesday, April 14, 2004
Here is my poem for Lil' George. Maybe I'll read it tomorrow in Austin. It still sounds good without the foreign policy reflex gag.
Kiss, with Tongues
There are tongues in various
places, tongues in the desert,
the thick tongues dense
with grit and alum, tongues
in the unknown, tongues
in the pickle-jar, seamless
bolts of tongues folded
over satin-trimmed saw-
horses, satin-trimmed
tongues, slick and elegant
worldly orbs of bunchy
elocution, stained tongues
in sewer-pits, tongues
bouncing on the mattress
sprung and deft and
bunty tongues, tongues in
your sphere of
reference, each tongue
a monolith, each tongue
a witness, each tongue
brethren to your pits
and whorls and growths
and spores—each tongue
3-dimensional, planetary
tongues, tongues of gravity
and atmosphere, depression,
mercurial tongues,
microscopic tongues,
a velvet curtain
tongue as tongue
to taste the weather
and gage the lustrum,
a mani-folded tongue,
a tongue to warp the
forum and cull the
radium from the
sun, a tongue born
of acids and ante-
bellum, a tongue of
illegitimate
construction, a tongue
of diplomacy
and calcium; these
tongues are fleshing
out the heavens,
feather forth from
a stylus and a pistil
and a drum and lick
the chalk off the cliffs
and bid the vacant
home to dinner
and rid the angry
and the bellicose
of shades of pink
and fashions of ink
that really make
you stop and
think about a
tender muscle
or how love is not
indelible, but like
a ______, it starts
to bleed and
runs and runs and runs.
