they tell you not to stare into the sun

There’s sunlight bleeding through my eyelids.
I closed them back in May
and became occupied with the lines on their insides,
drawn like a child pretending cardboard makes a castle.
Zentangles to help me breathe,
(clean air, not cloth)
weaving, curving, 
confined, weblike, to the whims of my fingers.

Love-sick poets write sagas to the sun,
her radiant beauty,
her soft and golden warmth.
But the only words I have are barbed,
broken,
tattered and torn,
sharpened shards slipped through sliced hands,
through red zentangles,
stories of her barren deserts and mouths flayed dry.

I hide from her harshness, 
eyes pale and strange and unaccustomed,
like deep sea creatures, lost in the comfort of darkness,
unprepared
for blinding light.
Pretending.

After all, the ocean claimed Icarus, too.

But the lines begin to look like tally marks,
and I can feel my breaths counting
slowly
down.
The pressure of the ventilation system
feels like a mid-fall plane,
(the plane we weren't supposed to board),
slow-motion wax and feathers,
as we’re all tumbling towards the blue,
through the atmosphere we thought we made.

The numbers rise,
hope wavers,
and now -
now there’s sunlight bleeding through my eyelids.

I don’t want to open them.