so together and so alone
sometimes they dream the same dreams
the wide-awake, always awake
eyes filled with sights that are difficult to tell
a matter of seconds before daylight is everywhere at once
the centre drifts
space shreds time to pieces

tell yourself when you wake up:
this is the morning of a new day
they all have moments up here
of sudden obliteration
and a powerful sense of childhood and smallness
like heaven. it flows with colour
they want no view except this view
this continuous hum

here, nice feels such an alien word
it’s brutal, inhuman, overwhelming,
lonely, extraordinary and magnificent
she often struggles for things to tell people at home
because the small things are too mundane
and the rest is too astounding
and there seems to be nothing in between

track the seasons through many years
let me rest, her heart is saying
fortune tellers who can see and tell the future
but can do nothing to change or stop it
they watch it come.
those hearts, so inflated with the ecstasy of space,
are at the same time withered by it
more knowledge and humility.
speed and stillness.
distance and closeness.
more less, more more.

at the centre of everything
at the very centre of the waltzing universe
no negligible thing could shine so bright
its beauty echoes — its beauty is its echoing
its ringing singing lightness
it’s not peripheral and it’s not the centre;
it’s not everything and it’s not nothing
but it seems much more than something

the staggering extent of our own non-extent
is a tumultuous and wave-tossed offering of peace
an animal that does not just bear witness,
but loves what it witnesses
a hologram arising out of the blackness.
radiance itself
what would it be to lose this?

it sings with light as if from the core,
from the belly of itself
a heart pitching forwards, tripping up,
at the earth’s singularity
a collective of tumbled beauty
lush and dragon-like
mythical in the long last light
entirely abstract and which the eyes can’t fathom

it ripples, spills
strains against the inside of the atmosphere,
writhes and flexes.
sends up plumes. fluresces and brightens.
detonates then in towers of light
erupts clean through the atmosphere
the towers collapsing as if exhausted
remember this

his dreams odd and wistful,
as if they are not really his but someone else’s
the field of view
is so deep and multidimensional
that the warp of space-time
is something you can almost see.
once you knew it was an artwork
it pulsed with a different energy,
a different atmosphere

I’m sorry, she whispers,
but none of you get out of this alive.
get far enough away
you’d be able finally to understand it
to see it with your own eyes
a cosmic and mysterious thing
not to understand its mystery,
but to understand that it is mysterious
to see the solidity fall away from it

a soft, open witnessing of all that is well
they exchange understatements.
you know this of course,
but in space you can see it
they move like — like they’re not moving
just the light streaming through the water
just the depth of the colour blue
just everything

the crack of fate
too bad for you that those lost in space
are lost too in time
too bad for you that your world’s gone elastic
and topsy-turvy and right-side-left
time shrinks to a dot on a field of blank white
specific and senseless
then bloats without edges and loses its shape
quick as a flash, not quick at all
a watercolour washing away