Whisper

I am breath punctuated
by the aspirated pursings of ps and bs—
please bring me a peanut butter sandwich—
from a child faking sick
to avoid what he isn’t prepared for,
or to keep his mother hovering.

Sometimes an aside at the back
of the congregation, classroom, theater,
translated: see how smart I am or do you really think
we made the right decision?

I am intimate, urgent, irreverent, insurgent.
Overt, covert, subversive, recursive.

I would risk cliché, call myself
the language of lovers, risqué,
because there is this romantic lack
of distance—words hardly
audible, like meet me later—displacing
the cilia of your mammalian ear,
the follicular stimulus, anemone waving,
uncoiling in the cochlea, nautilus deep in the brain.

Without alarming the world,
or the girl sitting across from you,
the perfect little bones you named
in fourth grade begin their frantic iambic motions
and you cannot stop them
even if you want to, which you don’t,
because all important knowledge
comes this way, as breath behind closed doors,
or between women after dinner,
packing the meat and Jello away.

This is education, when conversation ceases.