body parts

i would like to write you a list, going from insides to outsides.
i don’t know much about body parts, but:
 
your pink pancreas does not match the pink on your cheeks, so.
that deinitely tells me something.
 
your freckles are sprinkled across you like stardust,
spotted-ivory like bone marrow
(this in turn makes my appendix do backflips—
not necessarily healthy, but
i don’t need one of those anyway, right?)
 
you fill my bladder up with love
and now i always have to pee.
 
your think-pink brain disconnects my cerebellum and now
i am falling apart,
thoughts skipping stones into great clumsy deaf ears.
 
and your scar tissue—oh, your STUPID BEAUTIFUL scar tissue:
it’s more like cotton candy.
you’re a carnival, really.
snowcone atriums, bag toss ventricles...
so what’s it gonna be, aorta crybaby?
you could probably dance circulations around veins so sappy—
 
and your kidney is not a kid or a knee,
it’s a jewelry box.
and your arteries are not art or... trees?
they’re highways
i get stuck in
because there’s always so much traffic on the way up to your spinal cord
(clearly, it’s a hit with the ladies.)
 
take route 206 up and around and in and out of your skeleton
until your skull walls are coated in my memory
until your phalanges are solemly swearing
until the lines in your palms read “her, she, need, me”
until the balls of your feet put pressure on you to walk in every direction but away
and all your ligaments are screaming, “TEAR ME!
so she can nurse you back to health with her hands!
which happen to fit into yours so perfectly!”
 
your mouth is full of daisies popping (because sometimes your breath
smells like death, you might wanna get a tic-tac for that)
and your teeth are always in the way,
too many royal crowns and not enough plaque.
 
& your spleen is SPONGY and ABSORBANT,
... like a tampon.
but you didn’t want to hear that! i get that! let me rephrase that—
 
i sleep on the safety net of your spleen, next to all the stockpiled
emergency white blood cells
which happen to play your heart like a harpsichord so well.
 
also,
your adam’s apple is more like adam’s apple ORCHARD
(i’m sorry, your neck is really wide, i could probably run it
in a mile’s time and at least i can still see your collar bones. i can’t even
see mine.)
 
you have love gums and a love tongue and love thumbs (that will most likely grade
this poem with a thumbs up or a thumbs down, with comments along the
lines of: "i can NOT believe you said my spleen was like a tampon.")
 
you have eyes that open for the first time every time
and biceps that seem to be flexing uncontrollably whenever i’m around?
and you say, “the beach is either this way or that way,”
and i say, “dude. we don’t live anywhere near a beach,”
 
but your eyes are so blue and so dense and so wide that one time
they almost tricked me.

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