Chemistry - Alternative Draft

Damn! What an inconvenient time to get an erection.
Will rose go with lavender, or is it too soft,
like the insides of his wife's thighs?

The beaded water flows from her lips:

Shampoo sudded into hair by swollen fingers
mingles with water - a clear petal seeps into the glass
she presses to her lips. In her veins, purple flowers:
Carefully distilled poison stains her fingers

lavender.

He wanted to name the cinnamon-lavender shampoo after his wife,
because she cooked with cinammon, and her favorite flower was lavender,
but that task belonged to a different department, staffed by failing poets
paid to come up with the consonance of "lovely lavender" and "sensual cinnamon".

When I open my lips to drink the bubble of the world
is that too, not a type of dying?

A soft translucence on the palm of my hand;
green leaves cling to brown branches,
red petals unfurl away from sulky stamens -
is this our world, no more than a series of images,
wet and sweaty between my fingers?

Every night, his wife dies a little when he comes inside her.
Afterward, she massages her head with "lavender-lotus delight".

The next morning, he whistles on his way to work,
thinking how lucky he is to be loved, imagining a new scent:
cinnamon and raspberries.

He dons a white coat, curls his fingers around the steel microscope.
Beneath the lens, the brown cells resemble bubbles,
waiting to be popped, or dissected and categorized.

Will rose go with cinammon, or is that too soft, like the insides of his wife's thighs?
Damn! What an inconvenient time to get an erection.

When beaded water flows from your lips, breathe
in the scent of cinnamon and raspeberries -

Open petals.