Every day I fall upward into a sky of bleach. The clouds do nothing to slow my inertia; even their sweat is wicked away by the speed of my velocity. My eyes remain open against the wind, albeit unwillingly - I took a vegetable peeler to them long ago to make sure I wouldn't miss a thing. Nonetheless I can never seem to fix them now upon the promised omnipotences of those out here in the deep, sucking me through their soular systems like vacuumed fire.

(Is evaporation at play in this potent luminescence? Was Houdini our savior all along?)

At parties I stick my face in buckets of dry ice to dim the floodlights and encourage the blurred effect of condensation on my glasses, even as Pluto passes gas in my direction. I am snowblind, no shades in sight. The glow of planetary serotonin ripples over my derma, beckoning with quick solipsistic kip-ups for riskless reward, but the appeal is fading.

Little by little I am drawn instead to the Stoogelike image of a baker's hand knocked askew, a third-cup of poppy seeds flung into the air to pockmark my own atmosphere of absence. There is just as much comfort for me in looking at a speck of ground pepper on a clean, tempered plate as there is in taking a mudbath and imagining the tenderness with which I can only hope we first wooed and caressed the moon before slipping ourselves into her cavities.

Strongarms will need to grasp me soon, if I fail to find an axis. Without them I float on, oxygen thinning with my gravities as I arch my digits toward steadying purchase on a purpose.