Starfields

The falling leaves are starfields.

My car accelerates.

Your bed: a distant planet.

This highway: outer space.

Empty bottles in the backseat are my

clanging, shimmering comet tail.

It’s Saturn’s rings I collide

as I spark off the guardrail.

Window down.

The wind, now, is unforgiving cold.

It carries all of your perfumes.

The smell is new.

The particles are old --

Big Bang dust, I’m told.

Are you raising your antenna?

Are you waiting for the “Wow!”?

My whole voice is Doppler-shifting

as I radio it out.

Rear tires are rumbling dust up

like a rover on the moon

that has retired itself to looping

figure eights amongst the craters

and the dunes.

I once worshiped

the expansion of all things

toward their end.

I am now terrified

of being lapped by

wherever things begin

and never catching up to it,

forever snapping every stitch,

like pulling pins out of a hem

lubricated by death wish and gin,

until, collapsing, I give in

to only ever being this --

admit wholeness cannot exist

without you wrapped around my skin,

holding this lack of guts in.