Mouth

When I was thirteen and dumb as bark and

married to a king and looked into mirrors

my mouth unwatchable my mind wandering

to the mouth you can train the mouth to

surrender itself to the eye or you can erase

the mouth through a series of thought

experiments involving lying to yourself and

the mouth employing a strategy of epigrammatic

wit in front of strangers and visitors in damp

badly lit anterooms or you can steer a mouth

through complex syntactical thickets when you

feel exposed, you can make the mouth sore with

expletives ... oh the brag of the mouth!

The mouth’s gentle implication, mouth-work

a mouth open, the King will roam

close to the mouth, land of the mouth, empire

of the mouth, oil-spill, flush-swell of the mouth.