How Language Works

I'm writing to you tootsie,
fingers on keys, (pads— mostly 8 and the edges of thumbs)
finding the letters Mrs. Fat Butterscotch Sucking Typing Teacher taught me -
hanging manila folders over my hands and stalking up and down the aisles
of clattering typewriters in my eighth grade class.

But I am not writing about you.

I am conscious of you
(counting, last night pat, a long time watching that one time, walking)
and what forms and follows through all sorts of filters to my arms with their lotion smells like cocoa butter and sandalwood and then on to the fingers where there are sometimes rings (BIG like the Tiffany one that someONE gave me with all the stones for the every year we've done that thing we do)
(smaller is the little band from a Nana -- a dish towel the only other thing I have of hers) and finally the tips of fingers which I called pads above is writing what comes from me. But it is still mine and I may be writing to you but I am never writing about you. It's about me.


When I write the poem about falling off a high horse, too tired to hold the reins from clutching babies and sucking cock, my only regret is that lying slut who cannot be pinned down more firmly. Language. But this is the work I do - duplicitous, solitary, dull, difficult, slippery, nipples. I digress.

Wilder was right--it’s the price of being a poet; valuing life every, every minute.