Ah, love poetry. Especially love poetry of quiet yearning. Is there anything worse? Ahem. Anyway, the stutterings in the poem were supposed to represent the idea of two left tongues, stumbling over each other as you try to dance out the words you want to say. I wrote this a while ago... tried to infuse it with a Neruda-like sensibility and failed miserably. TWO LEFT TONGUES I need to say something, so desperately now, that I can feel the crowns on my teeth cracking, the words committing regicide in my mouth, the kingdom of my vocabulary crumbling. I have two left tongues with which to say this. How can I, how can I- tell you- black haired miracle that you are, when my tongues trip over themselves in search of truth- these lost tongues like trip wires triggering explosive signals that my mother sees, knowing her son is lost to her. Heu cong? Em oi, how do I tell you that sometimes- sometimes I feel like my mother's ghetto garden during the years she gave up on it, her heart tired, her nose full of compost, her eyes full of flies, her hands never clean from the sun bleached dirt and chipped brick, her ears full of multicultural ghetto children calling her gook and chink while she stooped over her roses and tomatoes, wondering when this war against us would be over, how do I, I tell you that when I feel like the lost years in my mother's garden your laughter is my only bright yellow lily freckled red, reckless, defiant, If I could say this with my two left tongues then I could explain the silver slivers of joy that runs through me when I daydream of us watching the night unfurl itself, stars burning down in a streak while we collect those tears from the sky, is someone told me, if someone told me those shooting stars were actually meteors or comets how could I say that this daydream isn't about science but about wishes gambled on something that burns? If my tongues, if your tongues, were rivers would we flow into each other to find the mouth, the origin, would we flow until we flooded and didn't know whose mouth was whose and who began where? Would we taste the salt of ghosts? These two tongues, to bellow and belay, how could I delay my stutter when your eyes demand something or someone better, how can I translate what your neck says to me, and how desperately I want to talk back to it, sonnets, villanelles, haiku, ca dao, all useless, if only my mouth were a bee hive I'd let these stinging and winged pronouncements fly in search of their queen and make honey, we could walk in a strawberry field, you could talk all you want, because, though my tongues may tie themselves into each other over you, my ears love you, my ears are calm in their love for you, they share you with each other, they cannot have enough of you, they set my equilibrium to your butterscotch harmony These words, they dance in my lungs, but trip over themselves on two left tongues. Please put a finger to my lips, take my hand, and say "I know you know this dance."

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