It is when she wears those thinly spread,
flat yet ripe, radish lips, her thinking lips,
that I want to kiss her most. And even
though those same lips hoard speech,
fencing the words inside her mouth-cave,
rotary utters grazing the back of her tongue,
clicking the trigger, thrusting the hard swallow,
forcing the echo past the cork-chamber of her throat,
I would still risk my voice to cover the sparse
invalid heart-pink of her chin, with my own.
______
This may be one of those instances of language too high. Directly opposing Tim, though, "mouth-cave" is my favorite part. It's different, but not so different it's difficult to swallow (sorry for the lame pun) like "rotary utters" may be. That first sentence takes a lot of time to read, for me--it's dense. I love the "It is when" beginning, one of my favorite strategies. But after that it gets very muddled. It's a lot of words, a lot of descriptions, for the lips. I don't think you need, per se, to cut any of them, just relocate to a different place in the poem so they don't hit you all at once. Also, we definitely need the "settling down" line somewhere--the brief, perfectly placed, easily readable line that pulls us out of the intense poetic language for just a moment.
This probably wasn't intentional, but...Little Mermaid sort of feel to it? The speaker's voice as the thing potentially lost to gain this other person?
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