Fuchsia lips press forcefully against my own.
Dear Aunty Pearl once again makes her mark.

What sin have I committed to deserve such affection?
Permanently stained on my collar,
                on my glasses,
                       on my face.
I stand with a stiff embrace,
waiting for the pagan ritual to end.

Escaping to the garden as she makes her tea,
twenty-three years have gone and,
I am still a victim of her wanting lips.

The purplish red tulips
my mother planted for me stand erect
beckoning her unwanted presence.
Were they not a gift, I would have pulled
them from their very roots.

I turn and am confronted with the hanging basket
my sister gave me -a joke, a fuchsia.
It blooms without my watering it.
Drooping so elegantly,
                       so ladylike –
some would consider it a beauty.
It’s smell, a pungent reminder
of the cheap perfume my dear
Aunty Pearl wears.

“Where are you? Where are you?”
she cries in a lilting melody.
I hide behind the shed in hopes she will forget me.

Suddenly I catch glimpse of my bright smeared reflection
frighteningly, peering at me in the window.

I am taken back to my visit in Amsterdam,
where the ladies line up in the windows
and sell their already used wares.

Like Aunty Pearl, their lips are covered
with cakes of bright purplish neon signs –
darkened around the edges
and smeared slightly.
They are different
from other ladies.

Not that dear Pearl is like these women at all.
How could I make such a comparison?
How could I think such things?

I never asked to be her favourite nephew.
There is enough colour in my life.

My white handkerchief now bleeds
with its fluorescent pinkish hue.

She finds me crouching behind the pale yellow shed.

“There you are, you cheeky boy –

Come here and give your ol’ Aunty Pearl a kiss.”