Selected Poems
Losing my tongue
Carelessness has caused me to misplace my tongue.
Now momentarily mute, I cannot even ask for help.
Yet, I can track it down, seeing places my tongue has been.
Comments muttered without thinking, lie about loud
or silently suspicious. Mostly my words are in the way.
Secret keepsake opinions are loose about to injure anyone.
Insults stand at attention seeking annoyed sharp angles
and sneak around table corners and mock from counter tops.
Useless mansplainations are left in the most obvious of places.
My tongue is never where I last put it or never
where I have looked, over and under, again and again.
Never in good old empty hiding places, I come across.
Pausing a moment, I inhabit ghosts of the evicted languages
that had previously taken residence in a backroom of my brain where
dropped dust idioms clutter and forgotten wire hook terms hang on walls.
Latin, Biblical Greek, Canadian French and Aran Island Irish, deep dive
but never Spanish or Persian, there is trouble enough with my own
English. I just want to speak clearly and be understood, again.
Herself sees and says to me. “Stop and sit with your grandfather.
Hold his hand and breathe. Shut up and it will all come back to you.”
Grandpa is long dead, but I do sit, wait and my stubborn tongue, returns.
Now momentarily mute, I cannot even ask for help.
Yet, I can track it down, seeing places my tongue has been.
Comments muttered without thinking, lie about loud
or silently suspicious. Mostly my words are in the way.
Secret keepsake opinions are loose about to injure anyone.
Insults stand at attention seeking annoyed sharp angles
and sneak around table corners and mock from counter tops.
Useless mansplainations are left in the most obvious of places.
My tongue is never where I last put it or never
where I have looked, over and under, again and again.
Never in good old empty hiding places, I come across.
Pausing a moment, I inhabit ghosts of the evicted languages
that had previously taken residence in a backroom of my brain where
dropped dust idioms clutter and forgotten wire hook terms hang on walls.
Latin, Biblical Greek, Canadian French and Aran Island Irish, deep dive
but never Spanish or Persian, there is trouble enough with my own
English. I just want to speak clearly and be understood, again.
Herself sees and says to me. “Stop and sit with your grandfather.
Hold his hand and breathe. Shut up and it will all come back to you.”
Grandpa is long dead, but I do sit, wait and my stubborn tongue, returns.
