Ode to Tarah Leija

oh Tarah,

for whom my heart beats

oh Tarah,

who art squeezably soft

oh Tarah,

with hair dark like midnight
and other poetical things that are dark,

oh Tarah,

the tarahlisciousness of thy skin makes me weep
weep like a little boy
a little boy with melting ice cream
and hands too small to enjoy the dairy joy on a cone
with chocolate sauce

oh Tarah,

you are the square root
of love

oh Tarah,

you are the kiss and oak tree gives a Jetta at 80 miles and hour

oh Tarah

may little girls want to grow up to be you
and little boys want to grow up to love you

oh Tarah,

who is so sexy,
she makes that final "H" in her name silent in shock
of her beauty
and makes it speak to the rest of us,
"H" (an exhale)

oh Tarah

tall enough to shatter skyscrapers

oh Tarah

whose smile still breaks hearts
from 151.67 miles away
I looked it up on Mapquest

of Tarah,

you are the comma (,) in this sentence
and the period at the end of this one (.)
you are still punctuating my poetry
with a smell of skin that I can't deny
semi-colon, question mark, exclamation point, exclamation point, ellipse
;?!!...

oh Tarah

why do you tease me so
by not marrying me?

oh Tarah

I would buy you dishes
with a great china pattern
that your mother would love
like she would love me,
the boy who loved Tarah

oh Tarah

if you were a Kangaroo,
I would watch you hop

oh Tarah

if you were the moon
i would build a rocketship
land on you
and hit golfballs in a spacesuit
just to make an MTV commercial
20 years later

oh Tarah

you are where my keys are

oh Tarah

lets hyphenate your last name
with mine
and say them together
every time we meet someone new
that's real love, honey

oh Tarah

your name means Earth
if it were spelled differently
and we all spoke Latin
but we speak English
and it's spelled with two A's
and a silent H
which is Latin for nothing
but not nothing
i mean nothing translates into Latin
from "Tarah"
which is how I like
to love you:
untranslatably.

Summer Conversations in April

summer conversations in April
unglue the bookends between
weekends and weekdays
Calvin and Hobbes adventures
through backyard forests
bare feet in clover like when we were 10
remove the clothes of adult professions
fold up the faces of waiters, lawyers,
and corporate drones
stick them in a drawer
with fake smiles and name tags
and flip on cartoons
let milk soggy cereal
slide across tile in white socks
and don’t let mom
catch us with water guns in the house…
bugs, garden hoses, unleashed dogs
and summer baseball
short an outfielder and a catcher
we’ve forgotten when the civil war started
how to spell "obsequious"
or the square root of 121
left them behind
to make room in our heads
for sleep over ghost stories
tree house constructions with rope swings
games of ding dong ditch
and water balloon slingshots

neighbor’s cats hate boys
before they chase girls instead
and change the content
of summer conversations
from skinned–knees
and expeditions to rooftops
to kisses,
pretty nothings,
and shaking hands on feminine kneecaps
while boyish stories fade
until sons long to hear them

every day should sing like this

every day should sing like this
the pageantry of cities
swimming by tourists
drunk on summer conversations in april
bright shiny words or catch our eyes
costumes on skin, of skin
on a parade of genetic soup
in endless variety

every day should sing like this
where boys who should be brothers
reminisce over childhoods they could have shared
exorcise the pretty words
conjoining thoughts of hopscotch games
already pointless
boil down the bullshit
to its component parts
and only speak new things
shed free of the costumes and headdresses
so we are nameless

every day should sing like this
we pave streets with the should’ves and would’ves
let loose our insides to another
to cyclone leftward,
lift our skins back to Oz.
kisses that should be
gestate into gyrations of heartbeats
germinate across the carpet
leaving warm hands on hands
sweat and skin compacted tightly
and bare feet wading in shallow breath,
swallow from ear to ear
in another smile’s taste,
the alto and tenor shaking,
sharing harmonies like they should have
long before they forgot how to sing
dancing around the octaves with new resonances
beating forth the songs
of the next 100 generations in their smile,
pulled through hair and whispers

every day should sing like this
where new tribes dance
around new fires
on the laughing shadows of ancestral tombs
while new myths spring from shared tongues
and remixed memories
new loves replace ones misstepped before
and new starts from good endings