Black brace along your back

(you silk-tongued son of some salt-bitten stoic who on select Sundays sports a sex-slick soul patch):

does it dot and dent your dorsal with the diacritics of its pressure, a dimorphic deference

paid to the order of your puff-chested pride?

Sheer shawl across your shoulders

(you loose-lipped lover of leather-limbed libertines whose long legs on late nights lace around yours):

it waits for you to whisper the words which work you to wit’s end,

Chinglish on a Chinatown tchotchke charting its own Chavez Avenue chunnel —

“Fiona for flame-God-so feeds the world full and frank.”

Red ridge that runs your rachis

(you girl-smitten granter of gamey green-glass kiss-wishes who on any given go-round could grow greedy):

do you know it as a gnomon, ninety-notched and nodding “no,”

or think it a thawed thaumaturge, throwing threats as thin as thread-string

at ill-suited inamorates, interjecting

ultimata for the unfit?

Embroidered elbow patch and epaulettes

(you hot-hipped hepcat’s whore whose hard heart in neither hellfire nor holiday heats even a hint):

could they crease to cover capillary craze-cracks that crawl up from your cunt,

toughen your tubes’ tensility,

zip-fix your zagging zygote-sac,

xenograft their xanthic xylem-weave

and mend your melting mammalmost?

Jeweled jacket that juts

out in orbs from your ox-chest

(you adorned Adonis, acolyte ablaze, aid to après-atheistic abbot whose ascetic amens abound at the Anglican hall):

did you kill a kleptocratic king,

quash a queendom for the prize?

Vet your valor by answering our versicle with veracity:

Yell, “yes I did yes I do Yes.”