Stasis

Mentolabial Sulcus

You've worn down my skin to tissue paper,
Fibers and filaments like peach flesh
Cling to the grooves in your teeth, caked with plaque,
I wish I could lay in your philtrum again,
Amongst the cattail hairs of your moustache
That pull and scrape me,
But shelter me from the storm.
I used to laze in the groove above your chin,
Scrawling the lower half of your face
In the margins of my notebooks,
I wrote poetry around your anatomy,
And I drowned in the acrid whites of your eyes,
Dehydrated ducts work in overdrive, protein floaters like sea foam.
The muddy iris becomes a sandbar in which I stand,
Naked in front of your pupil,
This is where you would kiss me, and where my cracked lips would part
In a smile or my nose would start to bleed.
Acerbic words dangle behind your teeth,
Out of reach, the fruit unripened,
But your spine is welded together, the work of your thousands of hours
Being an online army cadet
For a horde of nobodies.
You would rather let the fruit rot on the ground,
Like the figs under the bell jar,
Than to bend down and pick them up
To place them in my skeletal hands.
The cyanide core of a peach, the pit that knocks us out.
The rock between the fleshy sides of love.