How To Escape A Universe That Steals Its Smile From The Hyena

I.

We all trip violently

into the interstellar void

only to get sandwiched

between a billion galaxies still sticky

with the invisible glue of dark matter.

 

For we are all just meals

to the lumbering minions

of the universe.

 

Drop your ear groundward

and listen:

 

the bone crunchers

are approaching.

 

Their fangs slip disdainfully out,

teeth full of whirling clockwork gears

and life-sucking years as they rumble closer,

ever closer.

 

II.

I dry her tears of discontent with kisses

that lovingly chase the curve of her spine.

I slip my fingers in between her lips.

I slide my tongue down her shuddering back

as a rainbow of colorful stars swallows my eyes.

 

Anxiously I await a breathy response

but instead her silhouette melts into silence

as time leaps forward and I am left resplendently alone,

whispering silky nothings to myself,

cutting out my own heartbeats then crashing them

against every windowpane I’ve sat listlessly by,

grasping for unattainable moments,

scraping fingernails of yearning across this jagged forehead

which rises and falls like a lung-shaped junkyard

full of half-finished metal sculptures.


Suddenly her smile returns like a vengeful sunrise,

stripping the darkness and refilling every lake

in our watery constellation of desire.

 

I paint onto the canvas of her body

a ruby mountain that shimmers like songbirds

serenading the daylight as the growing tremors of touch

shake the wisdom from my mind,

leaving me joyfully imprisoned in a cage of delight,

freed to explore the flushed terrain of her welcoming body.

 

III.

Yet the beasts always bite back,

brutalizing lips and fingertips,

pulverizing dreams into scattered layers of dust

that quietly pirouette to the dessicated rhythm

of a matter-blasted moonscape.

 

There in the bushy hillside of our hearts

we burn in the brushfire of malcontent,

spurning every helping hand,

for each one seems to hold a silver dagger

bejeweled with sprays of blood left

by the spent foot soldiers of sentience.

 

Wherever the sky spurns us,

we flicker,

flicker as the asteroids turn.

 

Whenever this ash heap of a life explodes into the atmosphere,

our faces become gravestones formed by clouds,

our eyes impact craters left by the crime of the human mind.

 

So smash us together

with our antimatter twins,

so we can incinerate the rings

that shield Saturn’s skin.

 

A gash rips open the stellar curtain,

sending our memory-stained limbs hurling towards the Oort cloud;

yet instead of becoming inert spare parts once again,

we feel the glorious blast of ultimate release

as a supernova shuttles us past the event horizon

of a supermassive black hole:

 

time

glacially churns

to a halt

 

the fabric of space

implodes

 

shrinking so powerfully into a single point

that even the galloping legs of time

are severed

 

splattered

against the walls

of oblivion.

 

IV.

oh,

sons and daughters

of geometry

 

this

is where we belong

 

halting

 

the stream

of years

 

snapping

 

the fangs

of fear

 

singing

our frozen song;

 

returning

to the beginning

 

by the sheer force

of togetherness;

 

exploring forever

like future astronauts

 

whose hands haunt

the kingdom of absolute zero

 

whose joyful tears

of ripened discovery

 

hang like amber knives

over the heart of a singularity.