HANDS AND LIPS

By Isabel del Rio

Look at my hands, not aging hands just yet

but you can feel a draught between the crooks and

a barrenness in the mounds, squandered

as hands are by daily deeds,

it turns out.

And now look at my lips: flimsier than

before, no longer fresh blossom

but a withered leaf, instead of a full protruding pout

a lanky pointed grin,

comparatively so.

And yet this is me, even now

it is me: hands and lips fast fading

into stupor before

I terminally succumb,

by way of explanation.

Such desecration of the body –hands to bone

and lips to ash– takes place by stages so that we

familiarise ourselves with their eventual melodramatic

state. Or lack of state,

as it were.

These hands to hold will hold nothing

soon enough, these lips to say words of love and to kiss

the face of love will find unsolicited rest to

their constant declarations,

in some way or other.

I look at my hands and I already see them as skeletal

and slight, I lick my lips and taste

the dust that one day they

will become,

up to a point.

I am also Death, my banished past, my future as

silt or slime, the endless goings-on

of a plan or

possibly a plot,

as an aside.

#darkpoetsclub