Appellation

Not too shy, not too delicate,
No one really cares about the toad stool found growing in my belly button.
Fed on lint and head cheese, the greased looking but dry pretender has deep roots.
You know the woods, the forest, the mulch and the clearing.

You hobbled horse at pastures edge.
Me bucket swash by the cold creek,
Curatives and tablets full of scratches.
The numbing English, forgotten French,
No one cares for the breaking ground of your Spring,
My call out and your response from the alley,
Pounding pots and pans, calling for liberation.

If no one cares, we can be bold and free and
Ask for more with our actions than we ever could with words.
I know a tender lecture on the palms of upturned hands,
A kneeling genuflection on the blowing of the horn.
Pass the plate,
Plant the fields of singing where the straw man blew.

The ash song, the faces grimed and burned,
Laying like dead logs where the creek turns and
Over time submerges those of us who once stood leafy and tall,
So what is left to fear?
Your words, late uncle, your sorrows young mother,
Your home, wet refugee.

Flags of many colors flap at island’s head
Where the jungle once grew.
Mother jungle line and her long, long time.
Not sleep but the sweep of eons and
Archaeon to the wet shore,
The receding births under dark cover.
Show me your skin, dark, brown, purpled with bruises.

The stand tall had generations of being small,
Cultivating the next and the tissues of the heart, lung and kidney.
I am not saying that our feelings give access to all ancestors,
No memory talks such a line.
But the line, horizon of a journey,
Companion of our insides is the great outdoors,
The howling snow of each other.

Ask and tell, unmask and cultivate the manner so delicate at court
To delineate the feeling best hidden of some possible passion
Held as a string tied to the leg of a bird, cruel, rational, ambitious and doomed.
The flight of female feeling as the water trickles.
Open heart of my meek asking.
Somnolence of another say,
A wispy mirage or a second bite of the smokey apple.
Some tart and savory of salt and wind.

We huddled as the boat was crowded.
Rules of iron, no place to go.
In extremity and now in bed,
The cave of lingua endura, proscenium of classic speech.
Hear the appellation given so few
As of the lover no longer shy,
The masculine, a lesson learned and
Transcended down the many paths,
Back on the shady bank,
Stung by bee and arrow,
Her silence no longer bought,
A crash of other plans so rare
We barely notice our ten years,
Our barely being able to articulate the matter,
Bold and self-evident,
Of our making,
Our sinew and heft
In each other’s care.