Leave me with only words 
and I'll write letters with my teeth.

I was wondering what I would be
if there were no letters--
If we woke up to find that
they had left for fear of being understood.
Everyone would remember there
was something underneath
the bunches of obscurely laughing 
teens on the covers of pamphlets
in high school guidance offices
but we would be able to remember 
what a 'Q' looked like.
"They were obscene," some middle school
principal would say while sipping
lack luster coffee from an untimely
Christmas mug--
Librarians would say that
they were the only thing to ever
resemble the face of God while
English professors would argue
that they were the only thing to resemble
the face of human--
And then some would never give up
and I think that would be me.
I would plant myself on street
corner even if it was too
cold to stop moving my fingers
I could count the syllables on
them to stay warm-- and CNN would
call me another victim of hysteria
while grad students would stop
repeating their thesis to them self
for five minutes to hear what 
poem I was attempting to 
stamp in the sidewalk with my
breath that day. Sometimes I would
forget a line-- maybe a whole
stanza. I would wonder what it would
look like if my volta had a face--
a thick nose like my grandmother or 
quiet brows like my brother.
I wouldn't remember most of the words
I would say-- like the shutters
of bent saxophone lips dripping 
in their own language like
melted snow into the bay--
but someone would remember. One
of them would stop and stop repeating
a grocery list, a cell phone number,
a name of a girl from a bus stop
and they would find that they
were always a 'Q' or a 'H'
And that the bones of their
jaws made up the resemblances of
every face they'd even known.
Even that of God.