A Brown Girl's Lips

I like the bottom one the best. I like the way it hangs and glistens. I like the fact that she can’t conceal it. I like the black mole that decorates the left side. I like it when she smiles and when she pouts and when she laughs. I like it when she bites it…

The top one is civilized. It’s conservative. She presses it down on the bottom one when she is trying to concentrate. It doesn’t curve as much when she smiles. Her top lip is somewhat ashamed of itself. It doesn’t portray her emotions but it compliments the bottom one rather well.

Together they bring balance. The lady meets the savage. They come together to bring her melody into the world. They come together to make sure she always gets her way. The girl is so spoiled.  I could run from her but I could never leave her. She plays the games that I like to play.  She likes the dances that I know how to do, and she always moves in my direction. She rotates around me as I spin on my axis facing her constantly. The light that I generate illuminates her and she gives me divine purpose. We understand one another and what we don’t understand we’re ok with.

I don’t love her at the moment but I find her energy to be very necessary. She isn’t one of the beautiful ones that I mistakenly let go while drunk with the hardships of my past—quite the contrary—she is the one that needed time to grow.

I don’t control her—can’t control her, but she wants me to think that I can. I like the games that she plays. It took me a long time to really confess it to myself but I do. I play games too. The truth is that I follow her lead and this is the one thing that I could never allow her to know.

YB

Before the Fall

I remember those days before sex was required in a relationship. I even recall those days when I was too shy to kiss my girlfriend. She was very dark, very beautiful, very hard, very thick, very graceful, and very smart. She was in the 8^th grade and I was in the 7^th and one day she began telling her friends at school that I was her boyfriend. She was so shapely and so popular that I couldn’t disagree, thus our relationship became official. But then what is a 13-year-old boy supposed to do with his girlfriend when he only sees her at school?

I knew what my friends wanted me to do to her. The same thing that they claimed to do with their girlfriends but I didn’t really want to. For some reason it seemed like such a rather vile thing to do to a girl who I actually liked. So I walked her to class. I waddled behind her while wrapping my arms around the front of her ribcage, like teenage boys tend to do with their girlfriends, and I placed myself against her perfectly rotund backside. That may have well been sex because that was as far as we ever took it. I enjoyed telling my friends that she belonged to me. I enjoyed her glances and stares from across the hallway. I loved the way she used to gel her hair back over a scrungy in a style the girls used to call “a freeze.”

Her image would come to me at night and I so appreciated how she always pleased me in my dreams so that I would wake up sticky and excited. I saved the gum wrapper that she wrote her number on even though I had known it by heart for months (568-8125). I bought her a Jessica Rabbit card for Valentines Day and I even let her wear my San Jose Sharks Starter jacket a few times during the winter. To say that I was enamored would be an understatement.

To be able to transcend a crush and actually attain a girlfriend as an adolescent boy was sweeter than life itself. This was before pregnancies, before heartache, before trauma, before pressure, before infidelity, before promiscuity; this was before the corrosive power of sex. This was before the fall.

YB