On the Drowsy Shore of Eternity

White edges tumble,
folding into scattered murmurs,
motion brushing the memory of touch,
and as eyelids droop,
drawing consciousness toward stillness—
we begin.

Worlds rise from the dark,
ten trillion yawns of eternity,
as time unfurls its endless tapestry,
carried like driftwood
on the tides of a lazy afternoon dream;
and I—if only for a breath—am.

I AM the cosmic dreamer,
a fleeting character
in their infinite dream,
a pattern half-formed,
half-sensed
in the pulse of everything.

Then, for a moment,
eyes part
to the faint warmth
of cosmic rays from distant galaxies,
and the dreamer lingers
somewhere between the fading dream
and the weight of what is.

The oceans of being
recede back to stillness,
as countless lifetimes
drift beyond recall,
and epochs dissolve
into the quiet
from which they came.

And for a brief, listless moment,
the dreamer remembers.

Stars dissolve into fading echoes,
and all that ever was
and will ever be for me
slips softly into forgetting
in the blink of a celestial eye.

Yet once more,
the cosmic dreamer’s
eyelids grow heavy,
to the light waves
of a fading galaxy
as they ripple across the horizon
of eternium’s twilight,
and a new pattern,
not yet beheld,
begins to take form
in the dark.

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

No rights reserved.

— Charles Voltaire