"the milk of the word..."

There is
beauty,
pathos,
wonder

filling her heart
more
that you ever imagined.

more letters,
syllables,
nouns and metaphors
than all
the sophists who've
laced paper with ink and
phrases with
wine,
hoping
to
create
something
that stings the
heart and
soothes the soul...

in her
throat
are rounded mind pictures
that cast
soft-edged shadows
along the sharp planes of
a distant
memory...

and she,
both dreamer
and observer,
subject and
scribe,

rising from the sweetness of
an almost sleep
reaches for
pen and
paper to catch
the
fading dreamscape
on a scrap of newsprint
torn from
the morning's
paper

in the half-light
she is
filling empty margins
like a muse-driven
painter,
scribbling
near unreadable
words that
begin to dissolve with her
awakening to the
walls and morning shadows of
room and
light
and the sounds of a house
groaning with each
gust of autumn's
early winds

as the violet light of
dawn slips between the
shutters,
she realizes that this is
not a choice...

she is like a
mother stumbling to her
hungry
babe in the dark

the milk of the
words
aching in
her
breasts