It has been four days of hearing you
Your laughter filling me up from where my toes end to where thoughts begin
Your early days stories
Taking me into long forgotten tales of my own
Memories and wonders and hopes and delights
Slipping between us like forever is still an infant
Like these old bones are not creaking
Like all my teeth are still where they used to be
I am not in a hurry to be the old man that I was before
Before you smiled when hearing my laughter just a few feet away
Standing in the same aisle Standing in the same dusty pathway of knowledge
You: forgetting about the Orishas and JuJu women book
Forgetting about the heat of the day and the market booths
Forgetting about the drum circle men and women keeping their thunder
Between their knees and wrap-skirts and welcoming rhythms
They are all around us
But we are alone
Just you and your smiling to yourself about the ways I am making you want thunder
In your breasts thru your belly between your thighs
Later after our third night
You will tell me of how you surrendered all of your old fears to my laughter
How you spent a journey of steps backward toward the savoring sound of it
How you pressed your palm to your belly exposed by your tied off shirt
How your fingers played along and said that my tongue would trace your navel
And spill cups of whispers into you with the same heavy baritone and bouncing joy
How you turned your face toward me and parted your lips intending to say your name
But instead you swallowed up the view of my walking and taking you in
Me: this is what the dreams of aloneness have taught me
And I have watched you saunter beyond and back to me twice already
You are in desire mode you came wanting knowledge of mysterious things and women
Somewhere you have reasoned that another book is waiting for you
I can see it in the way you come to the end of the shelves and take the corner toward home
In watching you I want to know that manner of thirst that way of having the tongue surrendered
That opening up and taking in of things anew
Later after our third night
I will let free every thought and want of you
From this first moment of you amongst these books of our people
You are already forever known to me for the way you want words around you
The way you steady yourself and touch each spine
in the same way that you will read the curve of me thru a wet towel on day seven
already everything that I knew before seeing you searching has been lost
and there is only come whatever will come whatever may
so… I ask for the title of the book that would send you on such a journey
and I listen when you turn your face up to me and say
that you are looking for book about forever
and it seems to be written on the sound of my laughter
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.Jas Mardis 2022
Jasmardis.com
Jas Mardis 