My New Favorite Poem

I hope to one day be as brilliant as the last line of this poem.

The Archipelago of Kisses
By Jeffrey McDaniel
We live in a modern society.
Husbands and wives don'tgrow on trees, like in the old days. So wheredoes one find love?

When you're sixteen it's easy
Like being unleashed with a credit card in a department store of kisses.

There's the first kiss.The sloppy kiss. The peck.The sympathy kiss. The backseat smooch. The we shouldn't be doing this kiss. The but your lips taste so good kiss. The bury me in an avalanche of tingles kiss.The I wish you'd quit smoking kiss.The I accept your apology, but you make me really mad sometimes kiss. The I knowyour tongue like the back of my hand kiss.

As you get older, kisses become scarce.
You'll be driving home and see a damaged kiss on the side of the road, with its purple thumb out. If you were younger, you'd pull over
Slide open the mouth's red door just to see how it fits. Oh where does one find love?

If you rub two glances, you get a smile. Rub two smiles, you get a warm feeling.
Rub two warm feelings and presto-you have a kiss. Now what?

Don't invite the kiss over and answer the door in your underwear.
It'll get suspicious and stare at your toes.
Don't water the kiss with whiskey.
It'll turn bright pink and explode into a thousand luscious splinters, but in the morning it'll be ashamed and sneak out ofyour body without saying good-bye, and you'll remember that kiss forever by all the little cuts it left on the inside of your mouth.

You must nurture the kiss. Turn out the lights. Notice how it illuminates the room.
Hold it to your chest and wonder if the sand inside hour glasses comes from a special beach.
Place it on the tongue's pillow, then look up the first recorded kiss in an encyclopedia.
Beneath a Babylonian olive tree in 1200 B.C.

But one kiss levitates above all the others.
The intersection of function and desire.
The I do kiss.
The I'll love you through a brick wall kiss.
Even when I'm dead, I'll swim through the Earth, like a mermaid of the soil
Just to be next to your bones.