CommaSutra (poem) by Christian Blake

by Christian Blake I love your English I love the way your words wind around your fingers Around my fingers in a messy cat's cradle of rhyme and Free verse trapping the wildly fluttering space Between words Green words I see your tongue dance around the secret center Of the bonfire I see your breath splash Against the goodbye windowpane in a pink fog Where you write your English with a finger I hear your consonants consumed like pebbles thrown at the water A kiss a slap a swallow into the deep-necked bottle And disappear into heavy uselessness I've felt your wet vowel thrown to the wall I've seen you pause for thought in a small hole in the Earth Like the storm between the light and the boom And I've seen you in that flash naked Gasping at a comma, a snapshot of indecision and pure beauty Between the right words stuck Under the rainy gable comma, On top of the zenith of thought comma, Before you come out slash/ down the other side O meet me in the rain in the valley of language Come to me holding like a flower a comma, Like the last fire a comma, An inhale too slight to wake a candle Like in a forest a falling leaf your comma, The branch you hold on to breaks in that comma, On a paper bed you lie out on the sheets And I send on wings of quotation marks "Write love to me" End quotation marks Remember your first word hit Return To the alphabet of roses yoU lay on WhY you shivered when you first wrote The letter X with your mouth on mine Condemned to a sentence of words X again my lips Return Me to your English entangle your syntax in mine You were speaking comma, WhY did you stop all at once question mark? WhY did your eyebrows hook like a question mark? I love your comma, that pause that _underscores A hanging moment of nudity a lingering raindrop and says That all words are abbreviations for the text in the belly Drummed in an iambic heartbeat one two one two YoU are talking comma, twisting the air on a semicolon; YoU create the space between thoughts like a potter at her wheel With muddy hands spinning the empty listening clay bowl of me Sculpting my sides and my center remember now I Interrupt and break your hyphen - The sound out of place rapped against the air casting The magic spelling of love with an X I kiss each word running down the dictionary of your body comma, Falling apart losing its definitions under my fingers comma, Trembling like newspaper in the wind kissing down From your neck down your index to your Footnote Remember how we said life's not a paragraph and death I think is no parenthesis This is when your body became a V Enter You say exclamation point Exclamation point Begin with a lower case o Apostrophe' comma, Another lower case o in the middle of God And the black of your eyes sparkle a white painful asterik* Up on the ceiling each star an asterik* comma, Breathing in apostrophes o' o' We are conjugating You are moving faster blurring to sheer verb comma, A verb like move like feel like breathe like burn comma, We say thrill on the page slash/ the silence Shift Whispering in lower case I hold you in arms of parentheses (this is our place) end parentheses Fully enjambed inside of you comma, You are speaking your English I shift My rhythm you make a vowel that covers us suddenly comma, We are destroying language I hit pound# again pound# exclamation point comma, You say upper case O Going down the alphabet punctuating the air Pound # still holding control Shift O again upper case O in the middle of GOD Begging with that question mark That says you surrender don't end the sentence comma, Faster moving the line you make a comma, Pull for more breath comma, CONTROL You bite my ear a syllable You are an angel on wings of quotation marks when you say "Oh my God" end quotation marks comma, The ghost pivots inside of us comma, a semicolon; You love my English Be there comma, I can see the end comma, Capital X O now CAPS LOCK O MY GOD Help comma, An ellipsis hangs... like a fermata Pound# O Asterik* Screaming in italics The violent instant caught in parentheses (O GOD spell G - O - D Comma, The pleasure holds in an ellipsis... Escape Return End parentheses) Exclamation point We fall back on speech Our moan makes slow eSses like smoke I love your English how you say Your love so eloquently and life's not a paragraph We die tonight but in no parenthesis And I tell you that you write the world wide open Beautifully we are finished Period.