You Say "Shoo!"

Your sweet urgency needs room,
requires optimal fandango music:
floor and light and something
like a tiny fright to keep
you glistening: employed
with just the sort of tug-of-war
that I’d enjoy with you – that lovers do –

fresh from the shower, fighting for
the power, pulling on towels.
You are mahogany with dowels:
you feel the damp and sometimes
cramp with a humidity
that sometimes issues out of me:
your precious wood expands

and shrinks precisely in proportion
to the drinks I foist on you
from my importunately pouring
soul. You need a latitude
surrounding you: you wish me out
of your meshed circuitry. You are
a Chippendale settee that dances

naked Chippendale cha-chas around
the hungry denizens of your purview,
like me. I descend to the impossible
shenanigan of the attempt
to climb you like a tree, and merely
rhyme nonsensically. You
living thing, you singing lesson,

hoochy-koochy dancer, piece of
gleaming furniture, you jockstrapped
stud who models in the sea of
my proclivities: indecipherability:
perfect antidote: bipolar antelope;
you John Donne flea that intimately
sucks my essence and infects,

and hexes. You are the Other who
perplexes: you convince me
of the number Two. I am
in orbit ‘round your gravity –
yet moving slowly out into the space
whose blankness adumbrates
the mystery of you. You say “shoo!”


.