Plasma thinned,
and I slipped free,
the first photon,
uncoupled from charge,
moving into clarity.
I carry the record:
fractions of heat,
ripples impressed
before stars were possible.
I travel still,
a line without end,
brushing detectors,
scattering into pattern.
Memory made in radiation,
not drawn in thought,
but stretched in grain,
a memento held in light.
What looks outward
is not gaze,
but field:
the universe unfolded,
as mind of the divine.
I am collapse,
a grammar of falling,
where matter forgets extension.
My edge is not edge.
It is silence,
curved into secrecy.
Light laces me,
coils, dissolves,
its final utterance
a word receding.
No thing leaves.
Even time hesitates,
folding into my heart
as geometry ends.
I do not hunger;
I am the shape
hunger desires.
A rage of broken fire
marked another margin,
a shudder where time’s stride faltered,
but it moved without question,
drawn by a calling older than light,
its past dissolving into the murmur of particles.
The living hush gave way to a silence unimagined.
There the traveler was refined,
its subject thinned to a single point of reference.
What lay beyond was neither death nor light,
but a vastness that received without gaze,
a sanctum emptied of shape,
where being itself became the only prayer.
It slipped beyond the reach of systems,
its course absorbed into the unlit gulf.
No measure, no centre.
Only the suspension of all relation.
The void does not speak.
It does not welcome.
It persists as absence persists.
And yet,
in this extinction of contour
there is a clarity,
a solitude stripped of self,
where peace is not felt,
but is.
Indistinguishable from the dark.
Thorn and Benediction 