Skin

By Corbin Louis

The nature of skin is perfection. Like our hearts hidden from sight for safe
keeping. The way your bones match ivory piano keys. Our bodies are for love, moist on the summer dock. The friction of skin and tendons like a whisper of ubiquity.

Your smile is a lighthouse for my breathing; your skin bothers me with distance and resurrections. An anchor of shoulder blades pressing on my nights. Kiss the
blueprint of my god and your gods and they will speak in spasms. The night will take our bones from the floor and replace the flesh of existence with a belief.

What I mean to say is that skin is value. Like two mouths of a humming bird in the heartbeat of your summer. I grovel at the moon of your neck. There are parts of myself I can’t see in a reflection, show me them with your eyes. Like a mirror image of mercury sliding across hips. Split the moment from my gut. A holy shrine of crucified bodies, the touch of skin is salvation.

Break into me and take nothing. Your home of spirits unbroken from wet lips.
Step in the hallway of my summer. With sweat stained dresses and old prayers
stripped from our tongues. Your body is an anchor for my soul.

Hold my name in your mouth like a fork tongue, say it backwards. Feel the
skin that tangles silver horns between our distance. Pink veins of the double headed hydra which is sex and persecution. Only love knows that skin is a morgue for sacrifices. So love me like sewers and skin.

Remember when I introduced myself. We spoke and shed the snakes from
our spine. More than our skin was perfection, more than our ghost town lonely, our sunrise blazing paths to goodbye. The impermanence of your smile taking time for hostage. Never to die again, never to break or be anything other than perfect.