What If?

What if the universe is an open wound, a catastrophe in making? What then? Do we snuggle within the voids between the stars? Do we build our homes in the shambling ruins of dead quasars? Mapping the desire of dust swirling in the bright structures of far nebulae? How should we think the thought of the brain itself being that it too was once a cold star? That every time I smile I am enacting the death of galaxies? Shall I wander among frozen time, passive and alone, gazing on the silence that is almost palpable; or, should I actively participate in the accelerated heat death of this blasted thought? Tell me, who am I? Am I a thought between two voids, a point of decision that cuts the truth from lies of a broken symmetry? How do I expose the emptiness that is? How efface the face that is no one and nothing? Where is the mask to hide this void? Elide the ‘I’ of its burden? To touch another is almost suicide. To kiss the lips of my lover is to suture desire and follow the slitted wound through the middle gap of infinity. The gap is our joy and our horror, the very site of our birth and death. Once exposed to its existence we forever wander the labyrinths of light between great clusters folded among black holes channeling their energy which is our only ever life. Between Being and the Real we all dance laughing like children on the edge of a great Ocean: the sun, moon, and stars cascading with the waves as they spill over our young bodies. Bounded by an infinite sea we joyously dive into the brink knowing our time come round at last when we too shall build our towers among the ruins of stars…

~ S.C. Hickman