What the Lyric Be

b-boy Wordsworth beatbox vocal cord code switching through the wheat fields at daybreak clicking his teeth against the corn’s high yellow thighs prying open like the sunlight’s tear ducts on the morning the moon forgot how to speak Twi the cicadas having screeched all night in Old English like a man who has forgotten his name calling out the leaves of grass as though stalks of letters at right angles have meaning a way of theorizing the rhetoric of beauty a fig tree trembling at the rain’s hungry lick a finch weaving myth into a nested crown of logic the wildflowers’ arms on dial-up internet a virgin using the petals as her service provider he loves me, he loves me not, with every flick of her wrist the wind knowing the typeface her lips are set in pockmark cheeks peppered with salt the politics of resentment seasoning the spittle true poems flee like a slave in Mississippi Googling “home” with no filter or cookies the tuning fork having shorted in the eardrum’s mouth the devil was in the details when he read the star’s hands prongs of a serpent’s embrace, steam dancing on a cloud’s rolled tongue, wet and pregnant with words so soft the dirt could swallow the sound what must we remember, to forget how we were born? when we ask for advice it is rather for permission for we know not what we do when we do it in free will a robot puts a conch shell to its lips and blows a man puts a seashell to his ear and hears the ocean tell a lie long enough and it will surely turn to truth