the sun is drowning in my throat
burning her way down and leaving
in her wake bright welts and brief
splashes of milk-white scar tissue strained through
with saturnalian blues, violet, bitter carmine and sunrise
flush of searing hydrogen, all mapped out by
your curious hands, teeth, tongue, your bitten lips
tools of cosmography
my mind is honeycomb divided
into hexagonal compartments being eaten
by glittering little birds of every colour and hue
winging desperately through screaming solar winds
catching and tangling in your long stream of hair
neurons firing in orchestral arrangements
but lacking percussion
my heart sinking below a horizon
distilled into platitudinous equanimity
that deceives the eye—showing nothing
of the dark leviathans thrashing far beneath
the barely rippling surface, their whipping tails
and surging fins all stomach-churning intensity
battling through bilious oceans
in lacerated stomach lining
lungs filled with breath of dying gods
oxygen swathes of blue diffused diaphanous
trailing serpentine over silicate drag of nebulae
helium shell flash, the taste of orange peel, bright pain,
and the faint wetness of your eyelash falling
onto my cheekbone
a world unravelling
in the smoky pupil of your eye
whose icy mantle hides internal endless seas
over silted core of cryovolcanic chasm
pluming from translucent tract of radiant glaze
in glacier stillness the world pauses mid-turn, stops,
and turns again, stops,
amidst violent colliding comet chondrite and cosmic dust
thermal pulse and sooty fields of rubine
eyes fixed in middle distance you blink
and all is consumed
my body loosening apart from itself
like continental drift, ponderous movement of great
stately landmass, my bones the terrifying Symplegades
clashing thunderously: a sound like the universe clapping
like a falling cliffside crashing into valley and river
sending up sprays of moon-pale cerebrospinal fluid
splinters of bone, of river silt, leaving long furrows
in the flesh of the earth, wounds full of tiny gasping
lost creatures, looking to the sky
and finding alien stars engulfed
in the curl of your mouth
at which i smile
tilt my head, looking to the sky, to your body’s softness
and kiss you very sweetly, adjust your ventilator,
to breathe in the moon
if only to kiss you by starlight
© 2018 by Robin M. Eames
