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this tongue will forsake me
and your eyes will
mispronounce a breath
in the reading
will forget the heart
of a voice
utterances of the ear
upon which
it will all be mud
and dust and phobia
and straining to scratch
surfaces or dig graves
or splash puddles or smack
mosquitoes or dodge bullets
and resist aches
and no one will want to marry
and all thoughts will be implications
and the words will rattle the
veins into and unto
and the laughs will be breasts
and the thirst will be quenched
and there is only the eager to be
and not or else become
unwanted and undone
or the microscopes of discovery
or we will retreat into
ideas of ourselves
projected on screens and in books
and no one will meet you
and no one will meet me
and we will become unmet peoples
afraid of touch or chemical reactions
or speaking and feeling the breeze
being beautiful or ugly or neither
and experience will teach
how to steal a weapon from a woman
and wear it like a skin
and we don’t want to be women
or men anymore
and babies will think themselves up
or risk being extinct
or put up for adoption
or record deal or petri dish
or tv commercial or tshirt brand
soon the only original living will
be those that have yet to live
and the old will be outdated
or bought out or extinct
and they use the masks we made for ritual
and call it art in their museums
of colonizing and being colonized
and we make careers out of being
colonized or sold on shelves
on networks, in campaigns
with slogans or catchy phrases
and snazzy graphics
and we are all doing what we ought not to
and we are all living these fantastical ways
of being without dying too much
or dying very little over a long period of time
and who says we were ever
really dead when we died
and yet the world was always mad
and never not enough and beautiful
though beauty is not a phrase you steal in your
admiration, I see it in your impressions
in your gestures and impersonating life is a good way
to start living, but how about that living
to wear the tongue as is only yours
an acquired scar in the instrument
that is your voice, and the loveliness
of it all is that you still plant flowers
in April and listen to highways
that are really oceans as cars wave pass
rushing the wind in the shell of your ears
like water crashing shorelines
and the only true metaphor
worth writing is the one
you keep to yourself
between your god and you.
and the ones most apt to survive
are those who know the why
regardless of the how.