~ with submissive indrawn breath on nights that smell of freshcut red, she writes of a love to which her language denied even words ~

love, he squeeze-spliced into seven types
and threw the two crooked corners away.
lt.col.grammar mapped moods on zones—
meet and mate by mountains, wait within
forests, sulk in pastures, pine away close
to the coast, and desert in deserts. by order.

what came of the margins missing in action?
at first the colonel outlawed unrequited love.
labelled it defected, subnormal, unfit for men
who were men. then at last he crushed
the red-hot rebellion of the rainbow border,
never letting May mix with December, or,
the rich with the poor, or the high with the low.
every mismatch was malady.

it was no country for old men or old women.
sugar daddies and cougars were banished and
the hunchbacked and the handicapped found
themselves in this lacklustre blocklove list.
the rulebook forbade poets to patronize them.
no history—no hyperlinks—no tv—no twitter
no news of this love being refused redemption.
this love, for twisted souls; this love, the lost cause.