Corpus Cosmos

Breathing in early morning light, something about the Sun makes you believe in reality today. You awaken to a greater woman, a casual celestial, in your bed. She lays like she belongs there, and you become the tourist, begging the question mark curve of her divine back. 

She wears the twenty seven moons of Uranus on her neck like pearls, nothing else. Is she Gaia or Galatea or God? You lean in close. She blinks up at you with Venus as a glass eye, sighs the wistful smoke of a Neptune nebula. You inhale her, taste Mars on her tongue like hard candy. Pluto rolls in her gut like roulette dice, Earth trembles with the globes of her cheeks. 

Little deaths, bed creaks, primordial truth under your sheets.

Breathing in early morning light, something about the Sun makes you believe in reality today. You awaken to a greater woman, a casual celestial, in your bed. She lays like she belongs there, and you become the tourist, begging the question mark curve of her divine back. 

She wears the twenty seven moons of Uranus on her neck like pearls, nothing else. Is she Gaia or Galatea or God? You lean in close. She blinks up at you with Venus as a glass eye, sighs the wistful smoke of a Neptune nebula. You inhale her, taste Mars on her tongue like hard candy. Pluto rolls in her gut like roulette dice, Earth trembles with the globes of her cheeks. 

Little deaths, bed creaks, primordial truth under your sheets.

Spend enough time flirting with the abyss and the Grim Reaper will wink at you from it. A chorus of Shinigami sings a hypnotic swan song. The warm ashes of dread and dreams rise to form a stage. This is rapture, the final act, it is curtain call to an audience of none but your weeping mother. Thanatos goads you into a tantric tango, staccato steps to the staccato beat of your Eros heart, he dips you past the edge of reason, you spin with determined abandon, spiralling, unravelling in his arms as loose ends do. You dance like the half-formed epiphanies in your headache, sweat out the almosts and the narratives and the pleases, eyes roll back to the start. Skeletal fingers grip your crumbling flesh, pulling taut the tension between now and nothing, nothing and infinity, infinity and madness, madness and ecstasy. You gasp and taste truth in the air.

 To Be Loved in Touch Alone

If ever you meet someone who knows only how to love in touch, spare them a kiss like loose change. Ever the fool’s gold, a touch is the most worthless currency. Performative tenderness can never dissolve the violence under the skin. 

Always, with their chapped lips and open mouth, they’ll beg, sputtering and desperate on their knees, “Spare me a kiss, even a diminishing one, even a greedy one. I’ll take anything, especially a fantasy, especially a lie. Touch me to deliver me from my flesh. Cast me in the role of someone who is loved.” They offer you their body for free, missing nothing but a heart. When you touch the offered flesh, you will become a dream; everything in their orbit turns into fantasy. It is a better bet for them to put their flesh on the line for a gratifying lie or two than to wrench the hurt heart out. 

Sometimes their eyes, those soiled windows to some searching soul, will plead a secret favour. They insinuate, “Prove me wrong and love me. I want a saviour and I don’t want it to be me. All I’ve ever dared to desire is fantasy, and to be touched at all is more than I deserve. No one’s ever really loved me - not even myself - I’ve reduced me to flesh too.” A single teardrop, worth little more than a kiss, will fall from their eye. If you have already touched them, it is better to walk away, just as everyone else does. You cannot save them and they cannot love you. 

All alone again, their battered heart will finally peer out of its hiding place. It whispers, “I am so tired. Fantasies only hold magic for so long and the clock has struck midnight on delusion. Alone, there are no more lying touches, I breathe easier for it. Maybe one day I’ll be good enough to be loved, loved enough to be good. Today, I am still filthy from the clinging grime of lies on my skin, and I tuck my wounds into bed alone. Today I am still unloved, and I am more tired than I was yesterday.” 

To which the body invariably replies: “Fret not, I know what will help. I must try to be touched again tomorrow.”