I Want to Live on the Tongues of the Human Race

I want to live on the tongues of the human race

I will give children lollipops
And I will become the sweet and sticky sphere resting on their tongues.
Seven years old at the zoo with grandma
Who will point out the many millenniums of daffodils and Geraniums
Yawning and crying

I will be the cough drop sucked on with a passion for health
Twelve years old, reaching for the ceiling of adolescence
Tip-toeing on the floors of innocence
In a white night gown

I will be the small strip of hallucinations when they have turned sixteen
I will send them into a dream
A dream in high lighter colors
Where everything is bigger than it usually is

I will be the white pill from the orange container
I will be placed in the back of nineteen year old throats
I will descend within and rid these heads of their chemical imbalances
Curing the shaking of legs and tapping of finger tips

I will be the powdered cylinder with the letters "AZT" on the trembling tongues of twenty-five years
Sliding into blood cells
I will not fail them
Providing life, I will

I will be the green straw on the center of your tongue.
With the pressure of your clamping mouth, I will spit rum down your throat
Burning you, and you'll bite the edge of me
Slurping away at forty years old, business dinner with your boss and his wife

I will be the thermometer placed in your baby's mouth
Drenched in the spit of a sickling
You're fifty-four
She's just shy of six months

In the hospital bed next to her
I am the tube stretching into your chest
You have given her your sickness
She's dying
You're already dead