Defintion Study

James Bowden

Say rain. Say I love you.

1.
Sunday afternoon rain is falling.
All I can think of is you, lover of past, and
nothingness.

Does rain become rain when it breaks from cloud, or as
it shatters itself on something below?
Is a relationship its first kiss, or its last?

Say kiss. No, say kiss me.

For a kiss to begin, the lips must part.
A kiss is defined by the sound of lips parting.
A kiss sounds only upon its ending.

2.
I met a girl who kissed like a grasshopper. All lips,
no parting, no sound. Small, sterile, impersonal.
Flitting like wings. No lilt, no waves, no oscillation,
just contact. contact contact contact contact contact.
I didn’t tell her. I never saw her again either, though.

3.
How to kiss:
    1.   Think you might be able to love someone. Even the faintest sliver. Now stop thinking.
    2.   Make eye contact. Ask politely, gently, smilingly.
    3.   Drink in their eyes, their everything. Now give up your sense of sight.
    4.   Moisten your lips. This makes parting easier.
    5.   Lean in, close your eyes, open your lungs, then your lips, then your life
    6.   Wrap your fingers around whatever you can find, blind, grasp for dear life–
    7.   open close open close open comma comma close gasp smile OPEN bite gentle close open close

4.
A kiss is an act of hope. To open once is to think that you shall open again.
To miss someone’s kiss, then, is to miss opening. When you left,
a part of me closed. No amount of banging and pleading has opened it.
No battering ram determined enough has run me through.
To open more, close more. To love more, lose more.

5.
Say relationship. Say us. No, say we.

A relationship is an attachment.
We is a subject pronoun. We perform the action in a sentence, or we used to, at least.
We still do in my head.
Us is an object pronoun. We cannot receive the action of any verb,
for we are no longer an extant object.
We is transient. You get subbed out for my father, a friend, some coworkers, for a one-night stand.

6.
I met a girl who kissed like a shark. All teeth,
as much parting as I could covertly manage, no sound,
just my lips being raked raw. Pain, metallic,
me perpetually pulling back in damage control. She
remarked that I seemed to really like kissing.
I didn’t say anything, my lips visibly bloodied and bruised.
How hurt makes the body tender.

7.
Say tender. Mean soft. Say
I never miss you so much as when I try to open anew.
Mean again; there is no such thing as anew now.

8.
Say flail. Think fail, but mean flail.
My 7th-grade crush ate kale.
She had an iron deficiency.
Maybe shark-girl did, too.

Say more food will equal more people. For us.
Call me words you haven’t used since 7th-grade history.
Call me arable. Can the same raindrop fall twice? Is it the same
raindrop? Does it even matter?

I’ve changed so much already. When I say I miss you,
what I mean to say is, I’m different.

9.
I’ve this image in my head of you looking across at me, bewildered by the cessation of kissing.
I just needed to catch my breath.

Say open. Say close. I want to know that I will be held again.

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During this poem, I spawned the line that ended up becoming “And Then God Said, Let There Be Rain”.