Erotification Poem by Morgan Michaels

Not rough like a train wreck or a car wreck
or loud like a cat fight or two neighbors
shouting angrily across an alley by night
about nothing much at all; but quietly, more

like rain perturbs the leaves, or soughing snow,
or calcium hardening a bone
changing like a diamond pressed from a coal
over eons, invisibly, underground,

do you proceed, gentle Erotification,
subtly filling the vacuoles of the father, the mother-love:
that Elder deemed by the canny child
a better bet for trust and emulation,

while the blood quickens (for wouldn't a foal rather run
proudly under the whip-lash
then idle all the dull day in the barn
tied, unbroken, by it's mother's side?) ,

until the sea is changed, till
the chord, newly augmented, rings brightly out,
until the tree, now green, now red, becomes
overnight the trope of a hitherto secret season

which will endure a while
giving (or not) it's denizen hope and skill
to be, in turn, a model for wise children to
worship and eroticize.