Horizon 1

A traveller glides voidward, slow,
Its compass cracked by silent stress;
No axis points the way to go.

Across a field of emptiness
It drifts through dust too faint to name,
A thought unmoored in wilderness.

The stellar winds no longer claim
Its fragile fins or fractured guides;
All vectors blur to pale ash-flame.

It angles where the dark divides,
Through lattices of frozen suns
Whose dead light folds in drifting tides.

No message hums, no beacon runs;
The void consumes the drifting spark,
A lost recursive set of runs.

Ahead, the swollen event-mark
Expands in rings of iron glow,
A boundary absolute and dark.

Magnetic currents ebb and slow;
The hull grows thin as spectral thread,
Still moving where light cannot show.

Then gravity’s unyielding dread
Unweaves its plates, its coded core
A fall through thresholds long unread.

Each former law applies no more;
Direction melts in tidal sweep
That churns through matter’s inner shore.

The craft dissolves in folded sleep,
Reformed as photons stripped of aim,
No self to hold, no arc to keep.

What once sought bearings, name, or frame
Finds none required beyond the rim
The myth of right released from claim.

In breaking through that boundary grim,
It sheds the need for north or true,
Outpacing orbit, fate, and sin.

No map survives the final blue;
No course endures the cosmic churn
And still the void proves ever new.