Wordplay is a boomerang. If you catch what you are thrown, a pleasurable volley can ensue. Sometimes it’s a bad throw and what you project falls by the wayside in some non-descript pit, never to be remembered again. No matter. You try again.

I have found that when you write from the gut and send it out to the universe, you are never ignored. A stranger happens to raise their arm and catch that throw squarely, and before you know it, that boomerang has come back for you.

Sometimes, if you are lucky it will maim you in the most beautiful way.

 

 

Last night, @LeslieHeme said to me, “Come over here so I may tickle you with this feather.” I was not letting an invitation like that go unnoticed. And so it began again.

 

You have only to say which parts of me you want undressed.
You strip me down to the wire consonant by consonant, undo me one vowel at a time.
My mind is a porn star when you’re on it.

 

“I’ve drawn the water; it is warm.
Come in. Slip off everything but your voice.
That wears you well.”

This voice is good only for the cloak it throws about your neck with long strokes of a hungering tongue.

She is rhyming now. Rhyme is rhythm with a few misplaced consonants. 

“Pull me down, take my pain, and wrap it in the sighs of droplets glistening on the windowpanes.”

“Do you have any tattoos?”  |  “Only in my head.”

“What about scars? Markings?”  | “Same.”

Pain, like butter spread thin is nearly indiscernible. Hand me the breakfast knife.
Let us be done with this morning’s meal.

 

“A cut drawn from the keen-edge blade of your mouth, sever resonance from sound.
Ache served as the warmth of wound.”

 

Dispel this night with one sweep of your hand. Eyelids close upon the day.
Your hot beating heart knocks at my chest & waits.

 

“Though it may not speak in turns and words, know that it beats, knocks as it yearns for the calm pulse of your terrain.”

 

I lend you my hollow arms. I lend you my bashful glances. I lend you my torrid sleep.
I lend you my stoic, my stanchion.

 

“I gift you my happenstances;
I gift you persuasion of a dare; in all essences, I gift you the speech life has yet to care.”

 

Your body lies with silence. Your belly consummate with the weight of the unsaid.
Your lips moving slowly, I will not betray.