Who touched who with which mouth? If I remembered backward
it would go something like “his gentle answers stir me up to anger
for a want of time.” Why should you share me? Its truest forms
(love’s, of course) get rid of all someone-elses and change, fair weather,
into a furtive line of wallflowers who couldn’t unbutton good luck
if its tongue did all the delectable work for them. No worried man
will find the right zipper that hums the everlasting song. To be sure,
best to know who’ll merely do-si-do and who’ll die for you in rushed tempo
beating down the thigh, pressed, hot in throng, then made to mingle
at the bar between sets. The dance leans against its intention to tie us off
in sweating pairs, cat-calling how lucky tonight’s gamble at forever will be.
Words spoken out here have the strangest ability to turn the room into
bedlam or quiet it to bedfellows. Against the anonymous thrill the microphone
calls out members of the lookers-on who turn away their headlights and leave.
In dark more humid for crickets, songs dishevel in into cast-off shirts.
I am dismembered slowly by a body searching against mine.
He dares the moonless night into foolish assumptions. Shapes that,
were they alone in the hall, would resemble the loveliest of both.
