Be My Sherpa – Andrew Varnon

Be my buffalo head nickel, my foreboding mountain, the leg I don’t have to stand on.

What if there were big things at stake?
Be my ruckus. Be my shoot-out.

Be my corduroy, my perfect non-sequitor.
Be my cedilla.

Be my circuit breaker, my prosecuting attorney, my lengthening shadows at dusk, my nest
of pine needles, my second-story window, my autodialler.

Be my hilarious fugue, baroque rococo.

Be my Boolean logic, my array of pointers, my system architecture, my database management
software.

Be my cascading waterfall, my oscilloscope.

My engaging imagination, my radical metonymy.
Be my stone fence.

Be my axiom.
Be my if-you-stare-long-enough-you’ll-see.
Be my subatomic particle. Be my ten lords a’ leapin’.
Be my backbeat, my key of C minor, my surly apostle, my green sea birdgirl.

Be my long strides, my inscrutable syntax, my mystic chancellery.

Be these things. Be them. Be my maximum payload, my elemental munitions, my full
complement of arms.

I’m asking for guidance here. Once I was water coiled under sand. Now I make my plea. This
is errata. This is what I forgot to say before. Listen. Aren’t I your blossom, your acceptable
loss? The comet is ellipse. The mitosis is continental divide. It communicates within its own
enzymic parameters. I’m asking you. All this will be ours. Every desperate clutch, every
extenuating syllable. Emerge, come forth.

Be my long gaunt carnivore, my nullifying vision.
Be my simmering, seething, flickering, radiating, shimmering, and undulating.
Be my hereby known as, my previously referred to, my otherwise, my elsewhere.

Be my scandalous reparté.
Be my semiotic wilderness, my midnight blue metallic, my queen’s gambit.
Be my unheralded latecomer.

Be that one move: the one where you cross over, go behind your back, put it through your legs,
spin around, in midair, no look, no hands, with a wink, outstretched, half twist, and somehow
escape with your eggshell intact.

Be my come on. Be my let’s go. Be my it’s a great day to be in Montezuma.
But I’m new now. I can never go back.