Lipstick Mama

Lipstick Mama smeared her soul in dark red tangibly across her lips. She was a poet and her soul was a poem. And it read something like this:

Love come in all shades
Sometimes in red lips
Sometimes with the blues
Sometimes in black hips
Love is loose

Lipstick message painted in a language more ancient than the hieroglyphs, more universal than music, and more lonely than an innocent on death row. She was well-versed. They didn't call her Lipstick Mama for nothing. Black as crude oil, her body was consumed every night, tricks ravaging her.

It took a weary part of her heart. Selling her poem, night after night, tricks ravaging her.
It took a weary part of her heart.

Thing about resilience is, if you harden yourself, you've let the hurt win.
The hurt in her heart was so big; like the moon eclipses the sun, the hurt eclipsed her inner light, though the light was greater.
Thing about resilience is, if you harden yourself, you've let the hurt win.

But she had a knowledge.
Lipstick Mama's soul, her lipstick soul, a lipstick poem, in a lipstick language, had a hope firmer than hope. The radiant, shimmering, circular sliver of light escaping the brim of the eclipsing moon.

Even though Lipstick Mama smeared her soul in dark red tangibly across her lips, and even though every night her dark red soul smeared over the shaft of a stranger [or maybe a regular; with Lipstick Mama you weren't ever a stranger for long]... her soul went untouched.

The dirtiest, crudest, deepest chagrin, with that white liquid dripping fresh from her dark red lips [her dark red soul now smeared flat across her cheeks too, half erased from her lips]... couldn't even touch her lipstick soul. Every man, and any man, could touch her lips, and women too [Lipstick Mama's beauty stirred untold pleasures even in the souls of women]... but they couldn't really touch her lipstick soul.

Love come in all shades
Sometimes in red lips
Sometimes with the blues
Sometimes in black hips
Love is loose

Thing about resilience is, if you harden yourself, you've let the hurt win.

Lipstick Mama had a knowledge that shivered like a heat wave through her soul.
Tricks came and went, paid their dues, consumed her glistening crude-oil-body, and left her used.
But she didn't harden her heart; she armed herself with vulnerability.

Lipstick Mama loved. Lipstick Mama feasted on them too, let her body ebb and flow with the waves of ecstasy, glimpsed for a moment with each dirty trick. She lusted, ached for the flesh of the still unknown. And the more she relished in the moment, and cherished each body, assuaged the loneliness of each soul, the more she knew. The more she knew that though she was paid her dues, she was to her own self true. A lazy, loose, lipstick love.