When the natural color of your lips
Makes Pantone’s list
And suddenly for the first time in years
the **** lipsticks in the drugstore reflect back at you
A bouquet of roses which compliment your hair and eyes
Suddenly, when you never wore pink before
Now you revel in it

If your skin bubbles up in pimples
Your fingers float up of their own accord
Dancing with the shared delusion of
A clean excision
Yes, it works this way:
Remove the thing of evil that has poisoned the water
Pluck it neatly from the tree and watch the flowers bloom

The face answers your fingerprints in a drop of blood:
No, it does not work this way
Your skin, your life, is not a lever
No two-step process,
No fulcrum to remove and leave behind a simple rod, inert
Not even a Rube-Goldberg machine
To be followed back end over end
The handkerchief chain from the clown’s shirt cuff
spirals out impossibly with no simple beginning

Welts on your face in dappled shades
Pantone’s colors of the year
You cover these over with foundation that
does not quite match
This portion of blood you seal away
And that portion you smear on your lips
Loving as much of yourself as it is possible
To buy in a tube