Singing the Body (and the Soul and the Bonds We Have Between Us) Electric

A friend of mine got married last Wednesday in Mazatlan, Mexico. I was meant to just be a guest of the wedding. Then, the bride's uncle who was officiating the wedding stormed into my room (which I was sharing with the bride's sister) asking me if I would please please please write a poem for the ceremony. I was pretty hungover, because it was my reunion with the bride after not seeing her for years. I said yes though, because, wow, what an honor. Also, I don't usually pass up public poetry opportunities like that, because they are more few and far between than I would like.

Stephanie, the bride, asked me if she could be the canvas for an episode of my physiopoetry project Skin on Sundays while we were together, so I decided that poem I read at the wedding would be yesterday's episode, and not only do I love the poem (it was a surprise, and she looked like she was about to cry when I was reading it during the ceremony), I love how the episode turned out. The final physiopoem is below (I posted a preview in a recent post), but you can also check it out on skinonsundays.com.

The Mythology of Kissing

I heard that while you kiss
the ocean lives inside you
its waves pushing up
onto your bones
its salty tide driving your lips
so you don’t have to think
and even its darkness
reminding you
how beautiful too it is
to have another side
it could not be itself without.
As for love, well some moments
will come
where you’ll find yourself wading
past the shallows
to the darkness
where kissing will come
willingly
to guide you to the other side.

---

The obvious choice was writing on her breasts because of how long the poem is and how busty she is, but it was also a chance for me to point out something that is important for me to share, and it's about body issues. So many women wish they had big boobs, and I took the opportunity in my post to point out that every single body type comes with its ups and downs. Steph always has problems finding bras and bikinis that support her boobs. She always gets stared at. She never knows if people like her for her or for her boobs. The attention is not always welcome. It's so easy, as a girl wishing her boobs were bigger, to feel jealous of girls with big boobs like Steph, because they are truly lovely. However, the grass is many times greener on the other side. If people took the time to think about how the person they are jealous of actually feels, they might discover that there is a lot more to having boobs than just being deemed attractive by men. In the end, the point is to love your body for the way it is, to recognize that every body type has ups and downs, and when it really comes down to it, your body is in part a vehicle for what you have inside; when you die, would you rather have people say that you were hot, that you had a great rack, or something deeper? That's some food for thought that helped to inspire this episode.

Still, it is important, as Walt Whitman cried in his poem I Sing the Body Electric, to value both the body and the soul, and so here I am so happy not only to present this episode as a celebration of the beautiful body of my canvas today, a celebration of her wedding and what that commitment means--told though the lens of how an intimate act can provide the perfect tool to make long-term relationships work, and a celebration of all this canvas has inside her as well.