Hard-Wired

Because of your
milky sugarloaf scent
that I want to breathe
two hundred times a day,
because of your weight and mass
as appealing to carry as a you-shaped
new-baked fruit cake,
because of your
rose petal skin
as alive as proving dough,
because of the ten wax opals
at your diminutive finger ends,
because of your arabesque form
and your rosy parabolic perfection,
because little tadpole I waited so long
that your first smile nearly broke me
because to massage your soft roll limbs
and watch you drop off like a cat akimbo,
because to hold you my fledgling, so perfectly close
so soft and inseparable in our monkey love,
because my little bundle of derring-do
my sweetpea, my bunnynose
my chickadee, my gosling
my yearling, my piglet
my owlet, my cheeper
my eaglet

nothing else
can hold a candle.