As I sleep
I am taken
over and over again
to the dental chair
like someone abducted
by aliens
I go through
the ordeal
in your place

Reticent Voice

Perhaps sensing the pregnant power
of fertile thoughts,
to birth and create,

I resist
each interior contraction,
willing myself immunity
to the impending birth
that presses so insistently
onto my white-knuckled
brain.

one by one
or in bunches
the words slip away

diffused
like perfume
in the large, drafty room
of a lifetime on this earth

until it is no longer noticed
and cannot be remembered