Clementine days, with the sun rolling ripely through
the garden sky -
the clouds look like dandelions or
big cats, with their whiskers forming a crown
around their face. We lay in bed with pots of tea,
you were grabbing handfuls off me, skimming me till
I rippled to myself creamily in my churn.
I was a balloon, I carried a crowd in my basket and got heavier
and heavier and heavier until I sank right through the ground
to the burning orange ocean.
I lay there on the seabed, smiling munificently at starfish and
mermen (both ugly caricatures of my own mawkish body)
and watching how, with each breath, the sun swum further up
your stomach, bobbing up and down on the crest
of the brown wave of your hip bone, and -
a dumb cartoon, I floated saggily upwards, with commas and
equals signs coming out of my mouth in air bubbles. There -
I fell asleep in the bath and you ducked your hands underneath me -
a touch like barnacles hugging a ship – and clotted
your green leathery seaweed pods over my skin
until I dissolved like salt in your arms.