Smiling Stellar Shapes Shown in Eyes Like Reflecting Pools Drained Dry (or The Great Nothing)
Time’s passage in perpetuity
struck such staggering
blows
to youth—
all hope, our hope—
all faith in the future
and the seconds slid slowly as centuries when
we shattered;
beliefs beaten, butchered
ideals broken up into
short shimmering shards sharp as
straight razors, slung across
searing stellar streams of screaming smoke and steam,
like shell-shot slivers set to shred souls into strips—
strewn stiffly about, shouting in stark stuttered
shock
all shining under skies stained with stilted
steely starlight of silent
solar spheres, smiling
dead across the
wastes of
time and
space—
dead smiles
dead lips and dead eyes
twisted into hideous smirks of caustic mirth
gazes fixed in the black.
Those staring stars are turned toward us,
we civilized machines of carbon
we who bow before our own brilliance, our antibiotics and our
diesel-electric locomotives and our intercontinental ballistic
missiles;
we who poison ourselves to pass the time,
we the sole manifestation of an empty universe in possession of the
capacity to conceive its utter emptiness,
we who tried to fill it with our follies
we who—we—who’d been so sure, whose salvation was
so certain—
or so we shouted as
we slaughtered ourselves—
so certain, so certain,
but we’d merely mistaken for sparks of cosmic affirmation
that we might have indeed been significant
that dead sneering scorn of dead distant suns
which fell upon our fields of forty thousand felled
before batteries of rifled artillery pieces;
but their bitter grins aren’t real
and there is nothing.
Because the folly of men oft felled folly itself, clear-cut forests of fallacy
in our pursuit of salvation
eternity, infinity
but in the end
it wrought only ruin.
Oh, man’s forlorn delusion-obscured impotence
And the stars all strung up in their sockets
each whose dead fixed stare touches nothing
do not exist
just illusions of our own illustration
and we too are illusory, and our being is
much too fleeting to be—
for the stars and the seas could switch and we might
tumble through the earth toward cerulean skies and
we might fall upon the heavens from below
and then out here, like the rest,
out here where the weed decays,
we might have long been
already but rust
and stardust.
This means nothing.
D. B. DEVILLIERS 