Joseph Noble

SKIN OF THE TEETH

This is it, whatever it is to do.  Found between the sheets, yelping, you can carry it wherever you want.  Take today's position for instance.  With a high degree of cross bowing, the upper register tilts, following absence beneath its tongue.

Lightning is a waste of time.  Don't wait for it.  Now, reversing the leaf will leave plenty of room for several different arrangements.  Here you cannot see the wires, the branches, the lips.  Turn one upon the other, and you'll see that the phrase has several alternatives.  Then you can construct the fork in whatever ways possible.  Tuning it to pitch, it is light.

Stand on the corner, bend it with your toes.  Waiting, the line of vision is strung with a certain resistance in the rain.  When you examine the curled toes, you can see the browned paper edges.  The flesh cold, the windows were leaving behind hand prints.  It was like seeing the lips moving on the other side of the panes but not hearing anything, the toes loving the feel of dirt between them.

In standing, you see an instance at the end of calling, the echo doubling its point of departure.  Tailing the small end of the eye, several bare branches wind their way around your fingers.  What could stand out among the arrivals?  If you peel back the outer layers of that argument, you can notice several notes of varying length playing throughout the different registers.

Turning it over in the hand, doubling didn't quite come within hearing.  You played off your two lips working as one, separating as they came together with her skin, as her tongue slipped between your lips.  Worded differently, you tasted it on each other's tongues afterward.

Light worked itself into the crevices, dilating to a certain aperture that the hands could feel.  One or another steps on each other's toes, lighting a match between the two.  Turn the pockets inside out, feeling between the lips for syllables.  You say one thing, but then something happens, it could even be something you dream, to change how you feel.

Slip between light.  There is a thin space reserved only for the eye.  A fingernail can be scraped against breath, hooked underneath a slight edge.  Lifting, you can feel the hesitation.  If a voice were to emerge, fingers might poise against air, feeling the throat in the word.  Turning on the ball of the foot, you can feel a bird's beak press into the palm of the hand.  But it's not a voice that will come.  The voice is already there.  It's something that's lost in the voice, and what has replaced it.

Tear the eye across the back of the hand, fold it between, snaking round the finger.  These could yet be placed within another walk, another sheet mentioned.  What could cross while leaving word, separating the same space you had given up for her?  You peel another layer of skin back, and feel your breath among the fingers.

Beneath the skin: roots, hair, and eyes.  They mix and wind into a tongue.  Chatter curls pores, eyelids quivering.  Say you dive through it, have you walked too far between?  Take another for instance.  Turning it over and around, recognize its touch from the sound it makes moving its lips mutely.  It seems to have feathers and a pouch.  Birches clump together filled with newsprint that has flown from papers.  Turning pages, you look at your fingers and see that their tips are green.

There was an eye that wouldn't stop moving along your skin, lashes tickling you, looking.  Take a throat down and examine it, its metal sweating in your hand.  Not another line of vision, but a different organ was growing, hopping with two legs and two short forepaws.  Along the strings, you can tether a finger.  With a voice tied behind your back, you couldn't help yourself and watched it scaling the wall, sniffing towards the other side, its pockets inside out, listening.

You couldn't help but find the map under the wheels.  Its eyes had entered the treads, and with your hands you could feel the features of the wind.  There was a voice that you would find in your pocket from time to time.  You would take it out and examine it, feeling the smooth ridges with your thumb, blowing your breath through the holes or along the furrows. Nothing was different.  A finger could be turned inside out, and you'd still find it there, breathing.

There were several lines that you couldn't quite figure out.  One seemed somewhat like a bird, another a leaf.  Yet another sounded like "Where will you find it?"  If you followed the one to the right, you saw among its tangents a digression that could be a branch or letter.  You could have created a whole other language, but your mouth was a little dry.  These voices had skin, turning stitches inside out, finding a leaf under the tongue.

Turn each in upon itself, and then try to remember, looking through the clothing, listening.  At the back of the hand you can feel a turn, a word or two, if not for the time being.  The arc cracks, leaving now if it could.  Slip your fingers through it.  A kind of crow silence hops on its hind legs, chattering away.  You think about whatever it is that memory approached being for you.

He steps between the eyes, fingers blinking, staring at the walls.  This little seed is a song he carries around with him, left over from his eyelid.  Delight could have slipped through, the voice finding itself in the palm.  He could hardly even hear, one hand upon another, scoring the wall, finding several flaps open, turning around on the fingertip, the voice stretching the skin's throat.