Flash on the Lightless Sea

some breaths, I think I can feel you sitting
in my living room, witless work of your fingers knotting frayed string from
the couch, while you read and swig good beer

all stars run empty black space accruing
their bits, a little at a time,
the yoke of self accretion, a trillion years in the nothing clouds
given only the consolation of color and the half promise
of conceivable future,
what's worst, every few billion on those goliath rotary wheels of space
time
they glimpse their companions across the crushing black
exploding, fireworks above the next small town over but at the most
impossible horizons,
yesterday clouds, hardly a lick of solid state on which to
wait for tomorrow and then
fusion,
prodigious heft of collapse and the eminent burning that'll
make constellations from the shapeless poverty of space, flashes
on the lightless sea flicker your cheeks
proud, the new sun becoming
anything at all, let alone the wondered object at the pointed end
of pitched fists for
all the life this space will ever know, they are
the worthy knights of sunset, the
puncture proof of a cosmic seamstress, a man
that a moment ago, like you, could not read
and now, is weeping on the books he cannot set down nor
show you

some nights, sitting just here, I hear near subsonic booms far
behind me, the rumble walks my bones slow and I
know you've passed the measured point, begun the crumble
into yourself to be followed by your detonation, just hardly
detectable out there in the lightless sea,
sitting
almost next to me, tangled fingers, future fusion and thread
reading and sipping good beer