In Your Face

 

What you say to a poet should be
carefully measured, not edited.
Do not mistake caramel
and the sweetness
of silence for censorship.
If she is blind, she will still peel
one good layer of your laugh,
she will have an analyst come
to your window in the night
and scrape the breath
from your pane to ensure
you are not sneaking a secret --
if she is not blind she will
poke holes through the air,
a pocket to insert your 7th
grade fear of mundane,
you're exquisite talent
for evasion as a child,
your distaste for girls
with a pierced agenda.
You will have to entertain
her by translating
something once
and only once,
so long ago it was
an ancestor to a formula
for the very sound of speech.

She will give you the entire
chocolate cake.
But, if you don't think
of offering her the farm
your leather jacket
a strange plot of land by the lake
the DNA of your first skinned knee
lobbed off in hesitation of wholeness,
then don't offer a poet an excuse,
an orb of onion rotating, sweltering
in its own sweaty juice, because
she will lob it back in your face.
~