wrinkles in time
I like wrinkles.
If I don’t iron my clothes much,
it’s because I don’t get the point.
Maybe it’s the ancient wrinkled mountain ranges
I’ve climbed since I was big enough
to give up the free rides
bouncing at the top of my world,
suspended between sweaty shoulder blades,
nestled in my daddy’s basket backpack.
Maybe it’s the wrinkles of the human brain
allowing us to fold the whole star spangled cosmos
within our tiny skulls, zipping from fold to fold
in the space-time continuum like characters leaping through
the pages of a fantasy written by L’Engle,
A Wrinkle in Time.
Maybe I’m just trying to iron out my laziness
with smooth words.
There’s some wrinkles I enjoy steaming out
with my woman. More than forty years
we’ve been exploring, fingering, oiling, tasting
the salt musk music of each other’s wrinkles,
and damned if there aren’t more of them now,
and damned if we don’t keep making new ones.
I definitely don’t mind losing wrinkles
when the most wrinkled part of my anatomy
expands emphatically
into a bold-face exclamation point,
because then I rediscover
the hot delicious lubricious surprise
deep within the deepest wrinkle
at the juncture of my lover’s thighs,
and when the small deep wrinkle
forms between her eyebrows
pointing to her mouth
opening and closing
to that hot slippery rhythm
of the beat of our libidos’
tempo pulsing hard, deep,
insistently increasing speed,
loud drumming into shaking into
wonderfully redundant eruptions
making all
our lovely
wrinkles
shake
in a
cataclysmic
miracle
of an
earthquake…
That’s when wrinkles get so big and deep
that they straighten out with a snap
catapulting me back
to our first time…
and the candlelight glowing
on her freckled shoulders,
pale breasts,
smooth skin.
~ Wry Welwood,
circa late 20th century
re-edited May, 2021