Stagger Tongue - 20180107

Startle haze spyglass doorway

Coffee shop and I do not drink coffee

Alcove on the left I see you motion

Invitation to approach

In staggered tongue I admit sometimes

It takes me a minute, the stimulus the buzz of it all

Gets to be too much

Two cups of jasmine tea and you ask me

About being an introvert

I mutter about an amygdala

Comfort quilt brown eyes

In the corner of tea jars and a box of lost umbrellas

I found you

In a New York sweater in my New Orleans

There is an observant part of you

That flushed me with permission to be

That is to say, a man who has been taught to hide

Who has long talked to the empty pillow

As if somewhere you were out there in first acquaintance cliché

Nine years of mine and six years and four months in age

Wondering why this flight south
Shaken snow feathered goose down

For a one-bedroom apartment cheap rent and fifteen houseplants

AmeriCorps let you decide where to help

Memories of a father’s Jazz Fest pilgrimage

With music in bold lungs

Zest for clarinet and piano and his second daughter songbird

Here in black and white cloth, blond curls

Tidy stature, bibliophile, brilliant teeth  

Help me remember my own in the whispers

Cured spice bustle of background mocha aficionado chatter

Middle of three sisters for the middle of three brothers

Choir singer like my mother

Father held family round table talks on Sundays

A man with four females

Daughters and fathers

Dating remembering the dead and the abusive

A morsel in me appreciates you have him

Knowing the injury of when a woman no longer can look at a man

My thirteen-year-old daughter

Model for how a man should treat her

Your father cried watching Cadillac Records

Beyoncé playing Etta James singing At Last

I think he must think of you at the microphone 

Younger sister Paul Simon shoes in Connecticut

Older sister pencil skirt big-job married to the Dane in Chicago

Younger brother coffee-fiend / record label marketer

Older brother tattoo artist married to the Canadian in Ontario

Mother paints and you shyly describing your father’s boating

Without saying the word yacht

As if the gilded tinge of something to create distance and yet love

About who you are and how close and sliver of trepidation

Mixed in how others have seen kin intimacy

As threatening in the frivolity catalyst quintet

Of those Sunday shared secrets of where is privacy in bond

Ferried truths of Carnival’s beginning

The bone gang drumming around America’s Jackson Square

A place of memory 1999 New Year’s millennium

On the steps of St. Louis cathedral

Crows on a wire outside your apartment

Recollect an epilogue unanswered of a woman in a crowd

At the pinch of sunset, you exit the door

Hair blown out, straightened, those brown eyes in mascara

Effort offered

I struggle to find the unstartled aperture to compliment you

Until candlelight at a table in the Bywater

Admitting the overanalytical too often bests the obvious

Jazz on the radio, lips moist in delicious patter

Closed eyes welcoming, hum infused animal exhalations

Palm on nape

Deliberate desire

Collusion of bodies in passionate embankment

With a woman prone to buckle her seatbelt

Knowing she is about to be kissed

I become chaos

Love is not an ordered being

Flood of the tempered

Under streetlights of my new favorite restaurant for its spectacular parking lot

Remembering a mariner weary of sirens promising to gnash

The steeple women, the burlesque scorpions, the kundalini yoginis

A mermaid I have yet hear sing

Tale in a barstool of a twelve-year-old boy waiting for his grandmother

Who you help find the confidence to be heard as a person 

Walk out of the bar of cat theater and erotic poetry

Toward a school like the crow on the wire

Spots we have passed so many times before

Innocuous and yet we jolt

Henceforth those places bear gravity inextricably infused in memory

Of how a person does not plan such intersections

Life startles us stagger-tongued

Such beautiful collisions