Shimmering glass eddies about the skyline
indiscriminate wavelengths unearthing new colors.
It is unlike any vision or dream I can recall.
My presence here is born from quelled complacency.
Spent in stasis, all in the name of what I hoped was progress.
Hanging by my fingernails on a great voyage
always ending up in the dull glow of a promised tomorrow.
That’s what led us here – to the great beyond.
This, the grandest example of creation,
ten billion years on, swirling through its relevant infinity..
It descended from such a brilliant species of blue…
the gracile membrane that transformed into something properly alien.
It is here, on an island hidden within the unsearchable cosmos,
I hoped to be the last of my kind to live under such a callous doctrine:
“favor the spur, abandon the rein.”
All so I might take the credit, free to sate my thirst for blood and wine built on the enmity of other men.
But now that I am here, and every breath is heavy,
my bones creak under unfamiliar gravity.
Pyramids of sand cut the sky open, standing as the last vestiges of a fallen empire.
I can feel this rock give a sigh, as innumerous galaxies spin beneath my feet.
Dust swarms among the rust colored everything.
It cares nothing for me, but surveys my figure all the same,
this silent planet carved in dangerous beauty.
Wet fangs and an empty stomach.
Circling the fresh scent of an odd organism emerged from an iron womb.
Ripe to plant another headstone.
‘Gather ye rosebuds,’ I think he said…
The flowers that grow here withered and calcified into rock
eons before those words met paper.
Their bones litter dry and nameless valleys
where ancient oceans used to swell and scream
under skies painted with a monstrous blue.
I wonder what manner of biology would dance and churn beneath those waves.
I wonder if they still do…
Would they come if I called them, those children of Methuselah,
to resume their role and tell me secrets of a diluvian world?
Or would they be immune to my charm, only to sing of ‘Salome’ and be my undoing?
The hands of Herod around their vocal cords chanting, “dynasty, dynasty!”
as my head rolled about the dirt.
Whether we are dead, or maybe just dying, it’s all made of carbon in the end.
We were brought forth from dust and cosmic finery, a long lost kinship with some distant nebula.
Flesh and bone curl into one another, soon to be laid out across deserts that feel all too familiar.
Could it be I’ve been away all these centuries,
just to forget what it’s like to journey home…
Maybe this has all happened before – but what life doesn’t call for celebration?
One faulty iteration after another,
the olympian gods of the universe,
spawning generations of single-celled anomalies,
casual miracles that gave way to all the oceans…
and me.
