Lyre of the Troubadour
whispering in rote

An inner war with verse moans in surges hazed and rippling through his form as he stretches for a break.
Honeysuckle lips invite the alliteration of a kiss as he unravels quotes of Strand.
I romp with joy in the bookish dark.
He savors poniards of verse that wail in blackened alphas down the belly of the page.
His eyes bore flesh of lobes as his spoken touch perforates this table’s length of breath.
I imagine callused fingers plodding the skin of my forearm where hairs lay golden like wheat circles pressed to earth and growing pressed.
He nurtures waking into me past the pages, balking the quiet quoting men dying under knee weathered, angelic, the icons whispering in rote.
He, a statue bulging, is the legacy of forefathers sailed from Africa at the Horn to thrust the face of Medusa before the cracking Titan of four hundred years.
Raving chords of threnody heightened with Ninth Ward baritone taunt me like a flail of nettles to shatter this face of privilege and clash into a ballad of tongue and mouth freedom and poets.
