A Kiss Is Just A Kiss

From the wooden frame above where the gunpowder waits there are also suspended a number of nets and trapezes. From here acrobats swing across the square, casting grotesque shadows on the dancers below. Now and again, one will dangle by the knees and snatch a kiss from whoever is standing below. I like such kisses. They fill the mouth and leave the body free. To kiss well one must kiss solely. No groping hands or stammering hearts. The lips and the lips alone are the pleasure. Passion is sweeter split strand by strand. Divided and re-divided like mercury then gathered up only at the last moment.

...

She lay on the rug and I lay at right angles to her so that only our lips might meet. Kissing in this way is the strangest of distractions. The greedy body that clamours for satisfaction is forced to content itself with a single sensation and, just as the blind hear more acutely or the deaf can feel the grass grow, so the mouth becomes the focus of love and all things that pass through it are re-defined. It is a sweet and precise torture.

- Jeanette Winterson
'The Passion' (59, 67)

Funny things, kisses.

I knew that I needed to leave my first great love when he no longer kissed me. This boy had been the reason I gave up wearing lipstick for years (there was no chance of keeping it on for long), and so when our lips no longer locked it was most certainly over.

Then there was a partner who would almost suck all of the breath right out of me as we fucked. These were kisses that would make your head feel that it might burst at any moment. One of my favourite forms of breath play.

And the first girl I ever kissed, who told me I kissed like a boy.

Dozens of drunken kisses with friends and strangers on dancefloors and street corners and in loungerooms and backyards and toilets.

There is a bench in a park I still walk across sometimes where I first kissed yet another boy in a moment of sweet and fumbling bliss that lead me to lose my mind and my heart totally.

My lip spikes provide plenty of opportunity for new smooches: 'So, how do you kiss with those spikes?'. Nobody has said no to a demonstration yet.

Whoretic gives the most delicious and distracting butterfly kisses.

And then the other night there was an unexpected kiss with GC that rendered me completely senseless and made the whole world stop and...

Oooh, what is it that intoxicates so? The softness of lips? The smooth sensation of glosses blending or the scratch of stubble scraping cheek? The lack of oxygen? Something about saliva that is not your own?