Stars

PART I

I’ve seen so many stars die that I can’t look into the night sky without being overwhelmed by the cosmic cry for help

There’s nothing for me to do except duck the plummeting lights and turn to face a faceless girl with a powerful smirk

I don’t want these stars to disappear

But I don’t want the girl to come out of her spell

And if I were to rush off to the aid of a diving star and help it back into its place and time in the sky, she would know

I am not from here

And I do not belong here

The faceless girls are too much for me to lose, but it’s getting harder to face the wounded sky

Each star leaves a fresh scar that nobody else is able to see

And the neighboring galaxies turn sideways and look at me with lopsided, imploring eyes

And their haunting symphony starts from the top

So many parts have gone missing but I hear them all as if the night was packed with stars in a blinding display

Each star strains now, to project both its own and the part of its fallen neighbor across a void that more vast with every day

Collecting the carcasses of expired stars that couldn’t sing any longer 

The stars that exploded with their last breaths into furious, miserable, screaming rockets desperately seeking the limits of the void

Only to fall off with a whimper and fade into the blackness with a final pleading flicker

I remember all of the stars that have met this fate

And I hear the hum of the void every day filling with tortured, murmuring stars, all calling out the name I used to be called by

“Snowden”

--

The void was never going to exist until the first star left

Until one light in a spectrum abandoned its place

To be a brighter light in a dimmer picture

He found a solar system he liked and bullied the star out, but he’d never had planets 

and moons and life to take care of, and burned it up all when he looked at it for too long

So he moved on to the next one, remorseless, but determined not to fail again

This time, once he had settled in, he remembered at once to look away so as not to set his planets aflame

He brooded off into the other direction, determined not to allow his new fostered worlds the same fate

But by the time he turned back to check on them they had sealed and frozen into barren landscapes of ice and rock

He spun once and his gravity launched the solar system into the far reaches of a new galaxy

Suddenly all he could see was an empty expanse, a black sea of abandonment from the  ocean of lights he was once a part of

A single tear fell from his eye and burst with a sizzling eruption into a flare, and he knew for the first time what it felt like to burn

Part of him was consumed by his own heat, but he welcomed and relished the pain it brought, and along with it, a smaller, darker being

The tears continued to fall and he continued to shrink, until he was hardly any bigger than a beach ball, and only as radiant as a moody twilight

Everything would have seemed enormous to him, but there was nothing around, nothing  left from his giant tantrum to see or fear or even disprove his solitude

So he felt alone

He felt alone in part because he was alone, and in part because he had never felt anything so real

Maybe it was because he was so small, but it seemed like all of his emotion had been forced out into the blackness before him

As if he had lost the room to keep all of his demons safe and shelved and they had been let off with every tear that fell on his searing surface, expelled with a puff of steam and a hiss

They loomed and swayed in front of him as if they were a massive wall on the eve of its demolition, and subsequently, his

And in this moment he made what honestly and truly felt to him was the solemnest of promises to escape the monsters of his past

He swore with such passion and naivety that, were there a watchful god, he would have no choice but to be consumed with adoration at the purity of the shrunken, broken star’s emotion

The vows were all the same, but phrased progressively beautifully, to the point where he stopped speaking in sentences and began to speak in verse

His poem went on for an untold time before a watchful god finally took pity and laid the crippled star to rest, and the little bulb fell off into an exhausted slumber

When the little star awoke, he felt guilt

Then he felt fear

Then he felt alone

He was supposed to stay awake, he was supposed to stay in verse, he was supposed to stay

With them

The darkness wasn't as dark as it had been before, but it was somehow bleaker

As if even the night had given up on itself

He could see all the scars now

He could see all the tears and the streaks across the night sky
If it was a battlefield, it was his

The sneer curled up his face and never left