Baby Epic

Gird your mysterious loins, I am trying to think
of a pick-up line beginning with war and ending with peace.
Inside it horses will foam at the mouth. A row of archers
shall go down on one knee. Dear, my heart
shall be strung so tightly that when a bell tree shakes its locks
and sparks the thought of me inside you pitching tents
a happy marauder bound for the interior teaching natives
my traditional songs as I slash and horn a path
to a darkness you never knew but hoped I might find, I will
let my crutches fall and charge into your searing affection
pretending to be healthy, a real sport with a grass-stained
smile, a bouquet of anguishes forever at my back or tossed
into a blood-fed stream coursing half-dissolved cries.
There you and your ages stop to water at my pulse.
There my eyes roll back and my gaze treads the air
for as long as it takes to tie an unbreakable horse to my stare
that inconsolable horse your loneliest age, a rank buckskin
annoyed by breath and only calmed by an enemy's dying look.
In my fist you put the reins to your ages, some slack
and some taut, dragging me away to inaudible strains.
Under burning confetti they drag me
and I can almost hear what they hear.

Copyright © 2007 Tanya Larkin All rights reserved
from Conduit
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission