When the sky shuts the hood and the night bribes the day
out from the darkness step the stars with chorus girl taps.

Everything that’s left on the tip of my tongue
moistens the saliva that speaks this verse.
Tuber, iceberg, the odd body in the oyster,
their excrement spread through my woods.

And everything I could say to you
I’d say in a tongue you’d never understand.

A cavernous body revs its engines and throttles
the song down in second hand speech.

My tongue cossets the blush in these poems
just so they can never be read by you.
My Land’s End tongue gorse grating the throat,
the leatheriest of eight bubbling tentacles.
A memory card that’s up to the hilt
the honeyed fig you eat just so it doesn’t rot.
My tongue’s a mummer’s suit in Midtown Manhattan,
a stone colonnade with no river passing,
a darkening kippa that grows and grows on their heads,
a black goddess’s finger pointing from above.
My tongue is the heretic emulated by the martyr,                                                                                                                        that spot on your body you
fear.

A bit down and dirty on playback, I was about to pull back
but now
I’m going all in
check out that flying ace, there I go shooting off again,
those meteoric words,
those distant words
you’re never going to read,
they’re orbital because they’re mine, this here
is mine, mine, like this my tongue.
Mine.