Cuddles are Drying up Like the Sun in a Data Lake

Sun is such a hard word, like a boiled sweet

in one of those round travel sweet tins

that nobody wants unless they’re sick,

those citrus colours: lemon, lime and orange

that even without tasting make your mouth water

to counter the churn in your stomach.

Sun is such a hard word, with its ‘s’ and ‘n’

that could have an ‘o’ or an ‘i’ slotted between

for that Donnian pun or a postlapsarian chime

making it harder to give birth to or acknowledge,

spat out in a sibilant spray of spittle

ending in bright, shining negation.

Sun is such a hard word, once part of Microsystems

swallowed by Oracle, its SPARC processor in LEON

designed for space use, a fully open-source

implementation that neither you nor I

can understand, the most likely meaning:

cuddles are drying up like the sun in a data lake.