Everything is beautiful

Out in the blue hush,
the world folds into itself—
silver static, breathing,
a million tiny mirrors
in a fevered dream,
a mandala made of panic.

Something rises,
something falls,
and from far away
it looks almost gentle—
like every bruise
is just light
when seen from the wrong angle.

The dolphins come,
sharp thoughts slicing the quiet—
and the pattern trembles,
reforms,
pretends nothing happened.

A whale opens its cathedral mouth,
lifting the darkness
full of stained-glassed fractures,
whole galaxies slipping
inside a quiet apocalypse,
a holy stillness
that feels like forgiveness
when you zoom out
far enough in time.

Above it all,
the luminous sky watches,
from a different kind of darkness
where the sun never sets.
From that height,
even terror feels choreographed—
a kind of beauty
wearing its teeth.

And I’m down here,
a small flicker in the swarm,
a tiny spark inside the fractal,
trying to understand
why every broken thing
still shines a little
as it falls—
down,
down,
down
into the bruise-colored silence below.

The darkness below calls me
by a name I can’t remember,
which is to say
that I forgot.

The ocean feels
like the only thing that knows
how to cradle a soul
so heavy with gravity—
the only thing patient enough
to hold my weight
as I sink lower.

Sometimes it feels
like there is grace in the ruin,
that hurt has a symmetry to it,
that the collapse is somehow
necessary,
luminous,
almost kind.

I keep hearing echoes
of a sentence I can’t quite place:
something about the world being soft,
or the pain not sinking
all the way in,
or how even the worst moments
still glow at the edges
if you descend far enough,
and tilt your head
just right
at midnight.

And the sea keeps calling—
gently pulling me lower,
with its hand
as I float,
singing in a mechanical hum,
lullabies from the deep,
wrapping me in its pressure,
as if to show me
where the light goes
when it finally
gives up on the sky.

People say the ruin has
its own symmetry,
every creature devours another,
nothing goes to waste,
every wound becomes a circle,
and from the right vantage,
it all looks like a blessing
no one remembers asking for.

And in the quiet
after the quiet,
the phrase finally returns—
whole this time,
unmasked by the cold tide,
like a shell
I once lost.

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Released under the Creative Commons Zero 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication (CC0 1.0).

No rights reserved.

— Charles Voltaire