frogger

1.
don’t turn around, know
from the muffled thumps
on the grass back there
that frog is still after you--
wet and frankly amorous
crasher of tea parties,
pounder against shut doors,
bibulous croaking sac with
flapping, mottled tongue--
a splotchy bookmark
that wants its place in you.

2.
she woke with her tongue
croaking hoarsely in her mouth,
an amphibian bloat
nesting between her jawbones.
how would she eat? but then
she caught a fly for breakfast.
talking proved more difficult:
in a rasping chirrup she asked for
coffee, news, change, affection
and the dessert menu. people
ignored these indiscrete 
requests, their hands 
waving her words away
like flies.

3.
negotiations get you nowhere
but listening,
night after night,
for damp slap on stone,
for splayed, sticky fingerpads
moving blindly along the bedframe,
for low modulations
lisped through the pillowcase,
tadpole whispers
that swim you ear’s meatus,
flagellating like mad
as they crowd and wriggle 
into their legs, lay 
eggs of their own.

4.
the spindly legs
would crack like matchsticks
on the backswing: she might
drop him on herself, so in the end
there was nothing for it
but to cup him almost gently,
cradling the clammy purse of him
while his pulsing throat 
grew against her palm,
and hurl him toward the open door.
she missed
and even after the morning
maids had been, she could still hear him
dripping down the stones,
his entrails strung like an argument.

5. 
no more gowns and golden balls, 
only the bleak rule 
of her future:  this book. 
after some deliberation
she kept the offended hand, 
evicted that ventriloquist 
tongue, whose progeny 
she pulls out by the roots. 
she watches pages flip 
under her thumb, blurred 
sentences bouncing, burying 
themselves in the margins’ 
white drift. unmoored, words 
hop off the page, kick 
silently away. punctuation 
floats and bumps 
in the blank like lilies 
cut loose from their pads, 
like pool toys--inflated, 
inarticulate--black eggs that cluster
and won’t hatch now