On seeing it all.

It’s so lovely. We see it through our eyes, of course. We say love. But the words spew from the flesh of our lips so often that the letters hang like wet leaves. Our eyes bounce off every brick and plant like a worn out tennis ball on its way to the trash. Our kiss, it dries the second it’s ripped from the cheekbone it presses on. The songs we love, they’re as flat as the air their chords cut through in a moldy room. Our favorite wine, it’s stale as the words our eyes gloss over in used textbooks. We say love, but we say it in daydream, with grey eyes and empty pitch. And we don’t care where those words go after we’re done with them. We don’t see them after we toss them around like a tetherball, strangled and limp to wilt in a pile on the cement. Never has love been so limited, so settled for. Never have senses been so labeled and chained. Through those prison eyes, never has life been so ugly, so ordinary. It’s the other eyes and lips we need. The ones that see when they’re shut, and set handcuffed beauty free like clouds. They slide over words like fudge and go back for more. They let you feel, bite, taste. They see in rich blackberry and oak and swirl on the tongue to ripen. They see beauty and scream at you to grasp it from all angles ‘till your fingerprints are left and nails bleed. These eyes are closed, but they see the trees and shake the leaves.