Untitled Draft

The beaded water flows from her lips:

Cream encompassed in a purple bottle,
sudded into her hair 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: the diluted contents
of a lavender bottle. (The shampoo
smelled of lavender and jasmine, her favorite flowers.)

So too: Did she poison herself slowly,
when she let you seep, drop by drop, inside?

And: 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 this too, not a type of dying?

A man in a white lab coat decides to mix lavender with jasmine,
his fingers curled around a steel microscope.

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.

In the morning, her husband 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.
Perhaps cinnamon would go better with roses - or is that too soft,
like the insides of his wife's thighs? He pauses a second, feels himself grow hard
as he re-adjusts his glasses.

Damn! What an inconvenient time to have an erection.
He puts his eye back to the glass: Beneath the lens,
the brown cells resemble bubbles, waiting to be popped,
or dissected and categorized into lists of images:
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 of water, red petals unfurling 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.