I
Even before language the human mouth
knew a word called Regret.

The wretched black whisper of animal death
sculpts its face even onto our pre-birth fingertips,
which fold and unfold in small, entropy-defiant taunts.

Even now Death pauses gently inside newborn brains,
softly cushioning them against wilting eyelids
and the frightening amber stupor
of the nearly dead.

II
He cannot focus his eyes.
The sporadic mechanical twitches
that emanate from his well-worn skull
reek of breath-stop endings.

Yet it is here under the glittering twilight of light-years
that his Second Birth into the universe begins:
with a thunderous infant-to-stardust reformulation,
kaleidoscopic waves of Self flourish
into expanding rings and bloom
viciously against the edges of the Universe.

In sublime germination What-He-Was overflows,
then reassembles into unblemished starlight,
suddenly streaming across the mystery of space
in an infinite dance of astonishing revelations
that could never be translated into earth-bound eyes.

05/24/2006

Posted on 05/24/2006
Copyright © 2026 Tom Goss