"First Kiss" by Tim Seibles

471,746 views ・ 2019-04-01

TED-Ed


Please double-click on the English subtitles below to play the video.

00:02
First Kiss
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Her mouth
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fell into my mouth
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like a summer snow, like a 5th season, like a fresh Eden,
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like Eden when Eve made God
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whimper with the liquid tilt of her hips—
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her kiss hurt like that—
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I mean, it was as if she’d mixed the sweat of an angel
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with the taste of a tangerine,
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I swear. My mouth had been a helmet forever
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greased with secrets, my mouth
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a dead-end street a little bit lit by teeth—my heart, a clam
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slammed shut at the bottom of a dark,
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but her mouth pulled up like a baby-blue Cadillac
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packed with canaries driven by a toucan—I swear
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those lips said bright wings when we kissed, wild
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and precise—as if she were teaching a seahorse to speak—
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her mouth so careful, chumming the first vowel from my throat
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until my brain was a piano banged loud, hammered like that—
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01:14
it was like, I swear her tongue was Saturn’s 7th moon—
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hot like that, hot and cold and circling,
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circling, turning me into a glad planet—
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sun on one side, night pouring
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her slow hand over the other: one fire flying the kite of another.
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Her kiss, I swear—if the Great Mother rushed open the moon
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like a gift and you were there to feel your shadow finally
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unhooked from your wrist.
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That’d be it, but even sweeter—
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like a riot of peg-legged priests on pogo-sticks, up and up,
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this way and this, not falling but on and on
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like that, badly behaved
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but holy—I swear! That kiss: both lips utterly committed
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to the world like a Peace Corps,
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like a free store, forever and always
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a new city—no locks, no walls, just doors—like that, I swear,
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like that.
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Original video on YouTube.com
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