"Tongue Tied," March 31/31 Project

For Doc Luben's March 31/31 Project
No. 7

Tongue Tied
By Christopher Fox Graham

Always a smile
with legs to heaven and back
her kiss must be languishing
and a little sloppy
if she even kisses boys

I wonder if she knows
that my heart skips a little
when she smiles
always at a loss for words
I sound like a bad playright's dull love interest
a faraway caricature of a boy
made of static and cardboard
penciled in by an uninterested editor
as the protagonist girl
seeks some inner wisdom
my conversation forced and insincere
small talk just to dance in the reverberation of her voice longer

when what I'd rather say
is how we should turn our bodies into geometry
and strive to determine each other's hypotenuse
race to see who can calculate our quadratic equation
taste what makes us different
while dividing by zero
add one plus one
multiply thirteen times three
or subtract my age from a century
until the climax of our calculations
removes any doubt of mathematics' sincereity

or perhaps I'd rather
she'd unloose her tiger blood
leap on my in the midst of strangers
and make the Adonis DNA in my blood
cry out in sheer madness

or even share truer words
of what I really want to say
when my mouth is footless

let my language follow the sincerity of my smile
to speak with untangled tongue