Red Lipstick Poem by Joseph Narusiewicz

Sultry fangs hidden in love
Antique hatred decorated with tassels
These purple chairs like hooves
Fear opens French windows
Emptiness under Sardonyx and rubies
Darkness inside your fallow husband
Your sunshine is pruned like a military base
I have escaped like Pan in the forest
You deserve your black rooms
You have taught me the hollow arts
Rembrandt painted your rich grave
I have met another
She is wounded
I heal from my sullen winter
We visit poets graves
Read to me my dear another epitaph

We both need slow dancers
Single argo lamps
Moonlight going down
Letters of Elizabeth Browning dying
Those that bury lovers
Dark scarves
Cut like waves in a hurricane
Space respected like a vast church
I am concealed by the latin vail
Your morals like nails in the coffin
Castles where ghosts sing and moan
I have met someone like me
Purloined and half alive
My baggage is dark
Her trunks of lovers
Her red lipstick on my cheek