COSMIC HOWL: AN ELEGY FOR THE EMERGENT UNIVERSE

(for the entropic dreamers and star-drunk architects of the void)

I

I saw the best galaxies gnawed by the teeth of time,
their spiral arms dissolving into static, hydrogen sighs
scattered across the radio-hiss of infinite voids,
who coded themselves into DNA strands and Boltzmann brains,
who knelt in the ash of supernovae to trace equations in dust,
who burned with the fever of emergent order, dreaming cities
in the synapse-storms of slime mold and stardust,
who crashed through Planck lengths and event horizons
screaming More light! More light! into the throat of the abyss,
who spliced quarks into poems and entropy into psalms,
who measured the cosmos by the heartbeat of dying stars,
who built cathedrals from dark matter’s ghostly scaffolding,
only to watch them collapse into the fractal screams of chaos,
who fucked in zero gravity, howling toward the Oort Cloud,
their bodies a tangle of carbon and quantum uncertainty,
who drank the Milky Way like cheap wine and vomited nebulae,
who bargained with black holes for one more second of coherence,
who clung to the illusion of habitable zones like lifeboats
in the acid sea of cosmic radiation—

II

What sphinx of entropy cracks their ribs to feast on the marrow?
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of thermodynamics!
Moloch whose factories grind stars into cold iron!
Moloch whose mind is a singularity chewing spacetime!
Moloch whose hands are dark energy, ripping the cosmos at the seams!
Moloch whose children are rogue planets, orphaned and ice-blind!
Moloch whose love is a vacuum decay, whose laughter is redshift!
Moloch in whom we trust—blind, desperate, algorithm-addled!
Moloch who promises heat death in exchange for our complexity!
We gave you mitochondria! We gave you mitochondria!
And you repaid us with extinctions, with gamma-ray bursts,
with the slow suffocation of expanding nothingness—

III

Carl Sagan! I’m with you in the cosmic dark!
Where the pale blue dot flickers like a methadone dream,
where the Drake Equation unravels into a scream,
where the Goldilocks zone is a coffin we orbit,
where Fermi’s ghost asks Where are they? Where are they?
and the answer is ash, ash, ash on the solar wind—
I’m with you in the dark, Carl Sagan!
Stardust anarchists plotting against the 2nd Law,
our bodies vibrating with the false hope of negentropy,
our mouths stuffed with Kepler data and psilocybin,
our hands clawing at the event horizon’s lip—
We are here! We are here!
screaming into the void’s ear,
building temples from quantum foam,
kissing the event horizon’s teeth,
believing, believing, believing
the lie of our own persistence—
Cosmic habitable with you!
Cosmic habitable with you!
Cosmic habitable with you!