You can often find Christopher Barzak sharing his beautiful visions in words at The Stage or you might found some of his work online. Either way, I could sit here and tell you all about his stories if you haven't crossed paths with his work, but I would rather you here it from his lips.

Christopher Barzak: About "Lips"
I wrote “Lips” after reading Shelley Jackson’s amazing collection of stories, The Melancholy of Anatomy, poetic, absurdist narratives from the points of view of various body parts and products of the human body. Some friends of mine were starting up their own zine at the time, called Say…, which would have a different question for each issue to which the stories and poems and articles included would somehow respond. The first issue was Say…was that a kiss? So I wrote “Lips” as homage to Jackson’s pieces in her collection, which did not include lips as a point of view, as well as in response to my friends asking me to write something for the first issue of their zine.

I tend to write in several different styles. The style employed in “Lips” is one I use less often, but which I love. It’s more of a prose poem, silly and serious at the same time, ransacking the official languages of academia and science and dating in order to address the subject of relationships and what they mean for people who approach them from different perspectives for different reasons: hearts, minds and lips. The results are funny and sad at the same time, but hopefully capture the truth of what it feels like to love someone who doesn’t love in the same way you love.

"Lips" By Christopher Barzak
Lips are a fine, fanatical species, varied in size and musculature. There are rosebud lips, fat lips, thin lips, hair lips, strong lips, weak lips, wax lips, and there are the lips that defy categorization: exotic and cunning, these lips that elude description are often those you will find hanging on the Most Wanted Lips bulletin board of your local P.O. You know exactly what I’m saying. Shut up if you’re afraid to admit the truth.

These lips -- these lips without name or number, which are beyond racial profiling, sexual orientation, and class warfare -- they are, if anything, criminal. They find themselves too good for washing dishes, making beds, or taking out the garbage. They lounge around all day long, demanding chapstick and lipstick and popsicles, which they take as a narcotic, finding refuge in the numbness, the not feeling, which sometimes calms their criminal mindsets. “I can’t help myself,” a particular set of lips once told me. “It’s like I don’t have a mind of my own when it comes to your lips. I know I shouldn’t act the way I do, but I do, and that’s just what I am, I guess, and nothing can be done about it.”

“Yes,” I replied, my own lips lifting into a slight sneer. “That’s just what you are.”

These lips believe themselves above the law in matters of the heart. I have heard of lips that take hearts and beat them bloody. This explains the wounded hearts, the bleeding hearts, and the broken hearts that sometimes fill our emergency rooms and must undergo therapeutic treatment after such attacks. You can place these lips in prison to serve time for violations of the heart, but they cannot be rehabilitated. They will exit the prison cell days, months, or years later, the same lips that they were when they went in. They will return with rationalizations for their behavior, and their rate of criminal activity will grow even higher than it was before they entered a correctional facility; scorned by a society that they have felt never accepted them in the first place, they will re-enter this society with a score to settle. These lips, themselves, take no prisoners. Consider them armed and dangerous.

I once knew a heart that thought he’d found the perfect set of lips. Boy, what a surprise he had in the end! Unwittingly, he had fallen for lips that wanted him for only one thing. This was fun for a while, as the heart enjoyed kissing so much and the lips kissed him often. But soon the lips began to show evidence that they were kissing others. The lips would come home smeared with a shade of lipstick that they would never have chosen to wear. Sometimes they tasted of onions, which the heart knew the lips never ate. The heart decided to confront the lips about these aberrations. The lips, when confronted, feigned ignorance. Finally the heart came out with the accusation:

“You’ve been kissing other lips, haven’t you?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the lips replied.

“Don’t play stupid. You never eat onions and that shade of brown completely clashes with your skin tone. Do you think I’m a fool?”

The lips just shrugged.

“Look,” said the lips. “I’m out of here. I don’t need this kind of hassling.” The lips stalked towards the door, but the heart pushed it closed before the lips could leave.

“Don’t go. I’m sorry. I should trust you, I know. Forgive me.”

The lips stayed, of course.

It is important to note that, a year and a half later, the heart stopped suddenly, unexpectedly. The coroner reported the heart’s death as a suicide, but I was friends with a friend of the heart’s, who had the inside scoop.

“It was a total cover up,” my friend told me. She continued by saying how she was the one who had found the heart. He was in bed, and his sheets were soaked with his own blood. “He had all these cuts on him,” she told me. “Lacerations. The doctors say suicide, but I know different. It was those lips, I just know it!”

“Why weren’t they investigated?”

“They had an alibi,” she replied.

“Where were they?”

“A lip bar. Where else?”

Apparently the lips went home with someone else that night. The
police were able to corroborate this story with the one-night stand, which were also lips, of course, and the rest, as the say, was history.

But I say the rest was lipstory.

There are lips that kiss softly, lips that kiss without reserve, there are lips that are wet and messy, lips that swallow lips whole, there are lips that leave lipstick all over you, there are lips that are warm and dry, there are lips that cover your whole body in kisses, there are lips that never bat an eye, there are lips that are loud and obnoxious, lips that kiss other lips as if they were in competition for best of show, there are lips that kiss you on the forehead then the cheek then the nose, there are lips that kiss your neck and leave the blood bruising the surface, there are lips that would never leave you marked in this way, there are lips that are considered prudish, there are lips that are considered loose, there are lips that have been known to get drunk and press themselves up against other lips indiscriminately, there are lips that never a drop of alcohol has touched, there are lips untouched, virginal, that should be handled with care, there are lips that have kissed only the surface of a mirror, there are lips that have no there there, there are lips that drive you crazy, lips that know no fear, there are lips that have crossed the ocean to find lips that speak to their soul, there are lips there are lips there are lips.

You mustn’t forget that this is a lip-dominated society. Compared to the heart and brain, the lips, for many, decide how we make decisions. Listen to your heart, your mother tells you. Listen to logic, your father says. But who listens to their parents to begin with? Not when you are young and free-spirited, and lips seem like the in thing.

Some people never stop listening to lips. They decide at an early age that the language of lips is the language they best understand. The language of the brain is esoteric and sometimes dusty. The language of the heart is often muddled and confusing: the rules are strict but change quickly and often, depending on the situation. The language of lips is pretty straightforward and basic: the grammar and deep structure and semantics have only a limited set of variations. The language of lips, because of its simplicity, rules the decisions made by our many politicians. But that is hearsay, and must be qualified.

What I mostly think is this: lips are dichotomous, an issue with no gray area, only a dark space between them where a person can be swallowed whole. But lips should not be considered inherently dangerous. They are lips, just lips, so don’t become paranoid. Some caution, yes, must be exercised, as with any other organ. But one mustn’t project any undue otherness on lips, as some do. This serves to only widen the gap between lips and hearts and brains, which, in the end, will be the destruction of our fine civilization, which gropes in so many varied directions for direction, for understanding and perfection. I hope I live to see the day that lips, hearts and brains everywhere co-exist equally, happily, without the hindrances of philosophical hierarchies binding us into prescribed roles.

But my own biases are obvious in this record of my findings. If I were lips myself, I would most likely not understand lips in such a manner: from the outside, looking in. For several years now, though, I have been living with lips, learning their ways and participating in their culture, which has changed me profoundly, and I must add, has opened a window into the recesses of my heart and brain that, previously, had never seen light, breathed fresh air. I now know lips, and the lips I have kissed and with whom I have held conversations know something of me. Because of this, my identity has become something fluid. Unfixed from the worlds of academia and romance, I have learned a thing or two.

One is that lips are as fascinating, as varied and complex, as any heart or mind. They have their own stories, and have no need of the heart’s sentimentality, nor the brain’s cold logic, although we would benefit from finding a common ground upon which all three can grow together.

The second thing is that lips can be cruel and unrelenting to those of us who play by a different set of rules. If you are to undertake a process of discovery and integration, if you are to become a pilgrim of Eros, as I have, then be warned.

Lips are like nothing else in this world. Lacking knowledge of the heart and wisdom of the mind, they will take what they want from you and leave you sprawling, decimated, broken. Bring whatever talismans and safeguards you might have to protect yourself from them. Make use of these. For if you are foolish enough to believe yourself immune to the power of lips, you, like my friend’s friend, the heart, may find yourself straight-jacketed, placed in an institution, where many hearts and brains have marked off the days of their lives after committing a crime of passion, or undergoing a
mental breakdown.

There is only one more item to consider when dealing with lips. It may serve to save your life one day, so listen well. When you involve yourself with lips, when you find yourself questioning their motives, or your own, sit down, calm yourself, take deep breaths. What you must do in this moment of despair and disillusionment, what you must do before making judgments, before deciding what actions need to take place, is to ask yourself one question. Before doing so, hold your head in your hands and your heart in your mouth. Then, when you are certain that your head rests firmly on your shoulders, and your heart is willing to tell the truth, ask the question whose answer will either provide you with relief, send you plummeting, or soaring. Ask yourself this one question:

Was that a kiss?

Christopher Barzak is a local Youngstown author. His website can be found here:
http://christopherbarzak.wordpress.com/