Lonnie's Lament

She floods the room,
a flash of moonlight,
the pressure of night rising.
I feel my taut strings plucked
by hands soft enough
to wreck religion.
I hear sharps and flats,
the subtle fingerings
that form her signature.
I feel indigo ventricles
improvise emotions
they can't contain.
See the saucy hips,
the twin legends
of her legs,
that cryptic tattoo,
the tresses braiding rumor
and myth. See
how she pimps mystique
into solo and chorus
inside a blouse.
Her skirt flashes through my past
like Billie's final sigh
teasing hopeful lungs
in a haunted torso.
I hear her halo
tilt to caress the curve
of the ear, chords born
from the marriage
of catfish and cornmeal,
from lacquered brass
and that last goodbye.
Check her thick thighs,
how they resolve into
an ankle's passion
for expensive bracelets
and the foot's five types of finesse;
the sweet tonic of each toe.
The daughter of possibilty
and pain, this onyx angel
skips like a rock across
my river, conjuring
the holiness of dragonflies.
I know the knickname
hidden like a curse word
under her scarlet tongue.
How can I forget those lips
whose low moan caressed
my neck all night,
when their prints linger
longer than the burn of Bourbon
on my mouth?

Ode to Two Lips

Horizontal half-moons
soft as cinematic whispers,
last night heard my tongue
pray for the sacred space
between you.
I want you for
your red's exquisite sheen,
for how easy it is
to be transfixed
by the Two of Heart's glossy finish.
You know it isn't good sense
that makes me imagine
your fat bottom gleaming.
Months ago,
I dreamt you as sliced halves
of fruit beneath glass,
above teeth white
as an apple's exposed flesh.
But now I'm shoplifting Chapstick,
brushing gloss
across a canvas
stretched like skinny jeans
after a binge,
bewitched by what
surrounds your mouth's
satin machine.
You've been chapped
by wind, salt and sunlight.
But a single lick
from the scarlet felt
of a wandering tongue,
can make everything supple again.
And when are your
busses scheduled?
I want to caress
a fever into your fullness,
sighs from your corners.
You need no MAC,
Max Factor,
Revlon, Clinique, or Avon.
Peck.
Peck.
Peck.
Now that I've kissed
the blues for you,
come close and hum
your cinnamon song.

New day. New try.

It's funny how the world works. I had started this poem a few months earlier as an experiment, trying to create a poetic analogue to a mathematical proof (Furstenberg's "Infinitude of Primes"). But although the resulting poem was somewhat interesting, the experiment was a failure on the conceptual level. So, after a while I decided to give up on the analogue idea and just edit the poem to get the best poem possible. And what do you know, just as soon as I stop trying the analogue concept and just do what's best for the poem, Bam! I stumble into a way to make the concept work.

ON THE INFINITUDE OF KISSES
(for Big Kenny and Little Kenny)

Let us define a topology
on the emotion L
by imagining a sub-love L₁,
to be an open love
if and only if
it either contains
open kisses
or it contains
a union of emotional sequences
L(f, s),
where L(f, s)=hearts open as wounds.
In other words,
a sub-love L₁,
can be open if and only if
every hesitant male heart
that is a member of L₁
admits some non-hero condition F or S.
The axioms for a topology
are easily verified:
by definition,
an open mouth kiss is open;
L is just the sequence L(U, I),
and (if true) is open as well.
For any collection of open mouths
the intersection of two
(and hence finitely many)
open mouths is an open kiss:
Let the lips U and I
form open mouths,
then, let the mouths meet.
The topology is quite different
from the usual Euclidean one,
and has two notable properties:
Since any open mouth
contains infinite kisses,
no finite mouth can be open;
put another way,
the complement of an open kiss
cannot be a closed mouth.
The basis mouths {father, son}
are closed by nature,
but we can imagine L(f, s)
as the complement
of an open mouth as follows:
"There are many kinds of open
how a diamond comes into a knot of flame
how sound comes into a word . . .
. . . Love is a word, another kind of open."
Among the sounds
that are emotional multiples
of open kisses
is rain falling on a field,
i.e. [a topology of tears]
By the first property,
the mouth (raining sky)
cannot be closed.
On the other hand,
by the second property,
the mouth (fallow field) is closed.
So, if there were only
finitely many drops of rain
then the mouths (field, sky)
would be in a finite union
of closed mouths,
and hence closed.
This would
be a contradiction,
thus L(f, s) must contain
infinitely many
drops of rain
falling
in an open field.