play, pause, replay

where's the sea where faces get lost?

This isn't the first mouth that has

bruised my lips and kissed over it

for thirteen seconds. There are kisses

better than the ones under dim 

restaurant lights that have bruised

my skin pink in the wake of time.

It's not every day a body gets undressed

in the slithering blackness; eyes bore

holes into the butter skin, lips that crush

every inch of youth tangled around the limbs.

You taste someone else in my mouth,

the vaguest memory lingering on my

tongue—washed away in the unfurled moon.

I'm no one in this brief world. Not even

a blurred face against long pencil strokes.

(Where's the sea where faces get lost?)

The songs of this mad world, the angry

oceans, your name on the side of my neck.

Where's the sea where faces get lost?

My hands are tarnished with blood, 

the color of your lips when I kiss them

tenderly. Tenderness, so brutal upon

your skin, that it burns it in the shape

of your lover's name. What do you do

with such liquid tenderness?

Young poets sit on the pavement and 

drench their eulogies in the dead sun. 

My name's a rosebud between your fingers,  

a stretch of blue between your wounds.