My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
they sing greenly
and glow and expand and tighten my face with their heat.
When she speaks her voice is a song
          a symphony
trombones and timpani drums
          37 Dixieland Jazzmen with parasols and cornbread lips
                   talking trumpets, weeping fiddles
                            jew's harps
                                     clavichords
                                              washboard banjos.
Her skin is melting snow, running off in streams,
          sublimating
revealing dun, grassy bones
and rolling hills
of roses—
          white and red—
damsk'd
Damascus
with its proud towers and folded, crinkled steel
glinting knives like her teeth
shining, incising
enfolded in coral lips
with nibbling neon tetras and undulating, roiling octupi.
She laughs, her suckered tentacle-tongue caressing the coral
and sending the wires of her hair
growing & flashing & searching & reaching
to the sun
          to her eyes
                   to...
my mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun...