my darling o you dahlia
of my third eye teased and pinked for
that enormous sneeze if I had any serious tigers they'd
growl and purl for you like butter
pumpkins fattening in their patches they'd be smiles wider
than water wheels or baobabs and if I
had my way it would be out of here straight past starship
enterprise to mistress joy and all
her deadly pulsars yes you mix me up and down and out
I go trala my fingers trailing fragrant
flocks of meteors or silky bolts
brighter than entire skies but each of me so animal
we curl into your palm with every pore
a pout until the universe unpicks its seams
and lets all its impossibles

I have so many questions:

Why do poets confess the loves

they cannot bear

in public? Why do they trala

lalalala upon the page

while making impossible

the flesh that breathes

in the next room?

Does the flower wear a feminine

or masculine face or is it genderless?

Is the blue dahlia

a figurative expression

for what is

impossible

or unattainable,

which is to say like many species

of love having indeterminate ends,

for not all love tends to bed

but may end itself

in suicidal flowers? Is, in fact, the word "dahlia"

the name for "a particular shade

of red"? Does she love red?

She says, and wears it, the rings

holding her blouse together also

make her breasts more noticeable

and more bare for being broken

by iron rings. And how can the eye

not look and love the sweet pores

of the animal flesh, so poor

in its alienating

isolations? Why does

the man she walks beside

have my face; why do I introduce

myself to myself

in another's mirror?

Was it true, as the philosophers said,

that all love is but the reflection

of an ideal form

that finds itself in many faces,

mirrored in this gender

or aspect, but always

the same serious

tiger of the flesh, growling

and turning itself to butter? And if the universe

should rip open its seams to all impossibles

who would we be? in bed with whom

or in what blue dahlia beds?