You kiss someone because you have come to the end of saying anything. You put your mouth up against someone else's as if to say, I have nothing more to say. I go on living but the words aren't there. They don't account for me. So, I slip out of language, I unzip myself out of the word bag, and tilt my head just beyond that confining dictionary of conventions and limitations, and that's where you come in. Your mouth is also retired for the moment, pushed up like a slit-open baked potato you put butter on and begin to eat. I put my lips against it and slide my tongue around, out of a desire to mock that very muscle that would otherwise want to lie to you, and will lie to you once it is restarted. For now, though, this idea of swishing around in that dark crevice of teeth and moisture is a way of saying nothing, doing something creative and beyond the usual distortions. How can you lie about kissing? I mean, is there some way to fake the pleasures of the tongue digging its hole in a little pocket of darkness borrowed from someone else? Is a kiss a sort of counterfeit gesture, something you can cook up because you find lying with words alone is an insufficient exercise? Then the kiss is an insertion of more fictions into the mouth of some gullible, easily duped listener still attentive and curious about you? You slide a thick coating of delusion into that mouth preparatory to a larger seduction, if indeed that is your hope of an evening with some mileage left on its darkness? But I don't see it that way. The kiss is the last remnant of sincerity, the final relic of a bygone era of truth telling. I kiss you because I do not want to contaminate you with semantics and barbed syntax, a big string of nouns and adjectives I spin out of a spider belly lodged in my imagination.