People say I’m killing myself
falling into my shadow but they can’t see
the up-rising part. They think I’m being opaque
when I wear sunglasses in the rain
so I practically have to shout,
I’m from Cal! La! Forn! Ya!
Haven’t always been, once was from
a small Pennsylvanian town famous for mummification
where they treated the brain in ways icky and obscure.
As you would guess, it’s difficult maintaining
homeostasis, mist escapes my mouth,
a geyser from the weak seal in my skull.
Ever jump out of bed and realize your head
is still on the pillow? We are all driven
forward by explosion after all.
I tell you this so you can prepare yourself
for my desire. I want to be your tongue doctor.
First I will learn the polysyllabic Latinate term
so my job can be immediately impressive
for being un-understandable.
I’ll be in constant legal wrangles
but you keep coming because, for tongues,
there’s really no one else.
In my waiting room, you’re calmed
by lute arrangements of James Brown
then led down a moss-textured hall
and asked to remove your pants,
sit on tissue paper.
Then I arrive in my red lab coat
like a peony blooming on fast-forward
and put my no-harm-causing, Hippocratic hand
upon your breast I mean shoulder
and say, Let’s see that tongue.
On your tongue I see your car has broken down.
I see the clawing at work on your frenulum,
the spiral of betrayals that has been your lovelife
in the fungiform papillae, the falls from the teetertot
instigated by bacillus-ridden homunculi
bent on your destruction. I can see
your dead mother glaring from her gurney
like a stabbed hawk in your glossopalatine arch.
I see you pressing your face against a horse’s neck
and weeping, weeping into an emptying tub. I see
you lost in tall trees, the green roots of your hope,
your hope feathering out at the tips
to join the feathery tips of other beings
like the tops of tied-together carrots.
I can see your bravery changing the pH.
I can see your beauty like sparks from bashed-together rocks.
I can see your beauty like grass on fire.
I can see how you’ve bitten your tongue, my darling,
trying to keep your secrets.