If you are lucky, language pierces the surface

Of your heart to deliver some invisible pulse, tender
Instruction on how to endure its own beating

Another day. Everything I know about violence
I learnt here. The way one word blasted me

Wide open. I planted my head in the mud and waited
For spring. I willed petals out of my cheeks. I watered

Each fingernail by licking it. I meant
To flower at all cost. In his experiments, monk Mendel

Cross-pollinated pea plants for two generations
At a time, establishing a theory of inheritance

Still used today. But Mendel never used the word
Heredity in his paper. He was interested in hybrids.

His generations of pea proved the presence
Of dominant & recessive traits. I speak both

But am far better at one, for example.
For example, they made it so through policy.

In my family, we pull live rabbits out of
Our mouths trying to apologise. The question

I hold down spews forth as vomit: remnants of lunch
Constellate signs of this week's fortune,

If only I knew how to read. But I use words
like assemblage, urtext, cursory, McSpicy,

coterminous, love, demiurge, susurrating subaltern.
Semiotics & ecology. I & dream. I share

A bed with words, my mouth buckling into babble.

If you are lucky, language pierces the surface
Of your heart to deliver some invisible pulse, tender

Instruction on how to endure its own beating
Another day. I looked up hybridity and found Mendel

Kneeling in his garden. How many flowers grow
From thirty thousand garden pea plants?

I asked Mendel but he couldn't say.