Your lips were so small against mine
Slick, soft, slippery, alive
Pulsating imperceptibly
Sticky, sugar, chewing gum spit
The taste of children's wine
Ambrosia, Spanish fly kisses
Sweeter than old bones can stand
Electricity that forces eyelids shut
Shocks, sends spiraling
Into another dimension with you alone
Joined together, flying or falling free
We made a Heaven out of nothing at all
Ruled the darkness and named it "light"
Let it shine on our naked souls
Pressing against denim, moistening cotton and silk
I slightly opened my eyes to steal a peek
To see if yours were closed
To see the roundness of the orbs
Indeed sheathed beneath thin skin

I traced those small lips with my tongue
As if to gauge their width
I kissed your cheeks, your nose, your eyes
But always back to those lips
How many hours lying there
Did I taste the Doublemint gum
That was somewhere in your mouth?
And pushed the candy to the side
Whenever it got in my way

I woke up when I sensed the change
Peppermint grotesquely morphed
Into stale tobacco
Thirty years came crashing in
Memories of plans abandoned
Empty prayers, empty mouths
Good times, bad times
But never that Heaven again
Whose to say you'd be the same
Had things not changed, had you remained
We are not the captains of our own destinies
Our ships are fated to never again cross
In daytime or night
Perhaps you stopped loving me the hour in which you left
My love for you died a slow and painful death
In it's last years it barely had a pulse
But I remember when that thing stopped beating
It was when I found out you'd started smoking
After you walked away
And the thought of Doublemint and Marlboro mixed together
Makes me sick