FLOATERS
- May 8
- 1 min read
By Sam Moore
I start to see floaters drift in and out of my vision,
Traversing the exhausted landscape of my sight.
There are two or three at first,
Wavering in that liminal space between the noticed and the ignored.
But then they begin to swell,
Like parasites gorging on my vision,
Sucking out the ocular marrow
And growing fat with it.
Their wistless wandering decays
Into something more aggressive as they
Plunge, pierce, bludgeon, break into each other –
Or else stalk solitarily, sinisterly, under the horizon of my eyelid.
Now the floater-parasites are no longer content with my sight alone
Because they discover the delicacy of colour.
They quaff the yellows first, and then the blues, and on and on…
Leaving me with only textures of darkness.
So I retreat to my mind’s eye,
Summoning daffodils of lambent gold
That sway languidly beneath
Skies of endless azure.
I create a river
That runs in lustrous, life-giving rivulets
Through the crevasses of luscious planes.
The floaters cannot reach me here.
This is where I remain, paralysed inside the recesses of my thoughts,
Even as my hearing thins,
And the sensation drains from my fingertips,
And the sting of my tears fades from my tongue,
And smell abandons me.
I shall remain here, until the daffodils rot and fester
And the river bleeds black.