Crevices

 

The General had prescribed this ointment,

Said it was top-secret, that the enemy was dryness.

I sat in my trench, my lips a battlefield of crumbled ruins,

Papery remnants of delicate architecture now lost.

 

Sergeant Pucker always warned us about the Great Desiccation.

We wouldn’t listen, too busy kissing the wind,

Our tulip-shaped mouths attempting romance with the breezes,

Oblivious that May’s storms were having a cosmic joke at our expense.

 

It was like rubbing mystery onto my lips,

A potion for the forsaken, the cracked soldiers in life's trenches.

Each movement peeled away echoes of the past,

Crispy crisps of old skin surrendering silently.

 

Flowers seemed to laugh, mocking with their hydration,

Bowties of floral cheer, while my lips, my apparatus,

Dared a smile, a silent curse to the sky,

Where clouds plotted against the human condition.

 

Dryness was an inevitable espionage,

May was a trickster and the garden a battlefield.

The ointment my sole defense,

Against the sudden onslaught of elemental conspiracies.