The Confession

What you don’t know is this:

Your name rests in the bowl of my tongue, smooth

and perfect, a salty round pebble. It melts: a lozenge.

Tiny molecules that won’t hold still.

What I want to do is chew it up. I want thick beef fibers

surrendering to the power of my hungry jaw. I want your

cool gelato sweetness to make puddles in my mouth, and

the piney gin sting of you to render me dense and numb.

The word of your name has become

the invisible nucleus of a small world

of slow madness.

And I am the black space between white galaxies.

9.18.11