sways over his beer
in a bar. Familiar, presumptuous,
he tells the same story over and over
with slurred conviction. It’s fresh to him:
scandalous, astonishing,
augural. He’s a proselytizer  
for a church of one. Back and forth
he rocks like a lonely
bell, tolling, tolling, on an island
in the middle of the ocean.

You hundreds of billions of galaxies
of Dantean effulgence

you numberless nebulae floating
like phosphorescent jelly-fish
in shoreless seas

you stars forming and going nova
in Stygian coldness

you planets born in collision, gravity-slammed
and flung, settling into orbits, 
swallowed by your suns...

We burn as quick
as matches struck and dropped,

and leave behind 
only a closet of shadows, 
door ajar, a hairpin
and a curl of dust
on the floor. 

But such astonishing beginnings—
such overwhelming endings—
all encompassed
in the time-lapse of our minds.