Chemistry

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 by swollen fingers
mingles with the water - a clear petal
seeps into the glass of tea beneath her.

She presses the glass to her lips; on her tongue,
cinnamon, in her veins, purple flowers -
Carefully distilled poison stains her lips 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 alliterations like "lovely lavender".

When I open my lips to drink the bubble of the world,
a soft translucence on the palm of my hand:
green leaves cling to brown branches, their curves bent by the wind,
laughter reflected off water, red petals unfurling away from sulky stamens -
is that too, not a type of dying?

Every night, his wife dies a little when he comes inside her.
Afterward, she cries in the shower, massaging her head
with  lavender-jasmine shampoo.

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.

Wet beads upon purple lips, a soft translucence on the palm of my hand;
green leaves cling to brown branches, their curves bent by the wind,
laughter reflected off water, red petals unfurl away from sulky stamens -
is this our world, no more than a series of images, wet and sweaty between my fingers?

I  open my lips and breathe in the scent of cinnamon and raspberries.

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.