Sometimes words are like fire, surging from the depths of my chest with an unstoppable force that burns through the gates and dams and barriers of my highest building. Singeing the edges of my teeth, torching my tongue, incinerating my lips as they rush past, leaving scarred autographs in their wake. The marks they leave behind are ones of smoldering carnage, of cannon fire, of blackened match sticks. Murky smoke will curl like angry hands around innocent throats, my searing sentences prey on gentle ears. Lips left charred, rough, and ruined from years of toying with the blaze. The fragile skin breaks under high heat, splintering off like dry driftwood, like the earth beneath a desert sky. Lips are left as cracked glass made of scorched sand.

Sometimes words are like ice, moving like glaciers across lips. Frostbitten tongues and icy breaths from words that never made it to the surface; frozen to the edge of my teeth. The hesitation, the doubt, freezes sentences in their tracks, takes thought and shoves it beneath layers of bitter snow. The rays of the sun fail to warm chilly words with heated palms, fail to melt away the fear of slippery phrases. Sharp words turn to icicles and scrape away the layers of protection. The wind slices over fractured skin. Avalanches of frigid words topple down, swallowing the world in permafrost. Ice pushes the land apart with indifference, creating networks of ravines that leave, the surface in ruin. Icebergs crash down, leaving lips a shivering disaster in its wake.