Everything is Mostly Nothing

Everything is mostly nothing, my love.
Everyone we know or ever have is an after-image, a patchwork dummy
Stitched together from tight assemblies of dust motes,
Each of which lives its long tenure in vain pursuit of companionship --
We are beings of air and light.
Our constituent pieces, blind and cold, unbearably old and without memory,
Pass infinitely close to one another, tantalizing,
Seeking collision but never managing it. We stumble and search
For fellow clouds of light, and when we find one another, you and I,
It is always new. We muddy our colors and press our hopes together,
Mingling our clouds to find particular solace and discover new ways to fly.

Our shadow drama is reenacted in the cosmos:
Lonely white souls scream and call to ghosts,
Stranded on burning diamond islands, marooned in the firmament
And glimpsing the winking of their closest neighbors,
The production of helium from a distant, long-dead hearth.
They, like us, shake and swirl in the black.
Somewhere, I'm told, they love in all colors
Bloodred passion spitting cinders,
Blues the size of a thousand suns if no bluer than yours or mine
And if you listen hard enough, even on the shores of our podunk ball of rock,
You can hear the beating of the worst of us,
The loneliest hearts their sorrow in perfect time.

Like all of us, I bear a secret (please don't tell)
In the deepest of my swarm of lost fireflies:
I am not real. I am a mock-up, a phantom, a fraud,
A flicker of the imagination held together by the incredible force of will
Or cooperative self-delusion.
Somehow, you turn on me your piercing ocher flames, and you see the truth,
But the pulsing blue lightning you carry rearranges my pieces,
And for you, I cannot rest in the cold grips of nothing.
You see a forgery and inspire reality,
You see a smudge and it becomes a Seurat,
You see a Magic Eye and create a Picasso, or at least a higher quality fake,
3D, HD, warmer, more lifelike.
From a lot of nothing, you make something.
Creation is an unfriendly place, and they say it's getting bigger and colder all the time;
Improbably, our twin fires burn together and warm us.

-- For Jenn, on our first anniversary of running off to the Las Vegas Wedding Bureau and coming out an hour later giggling and married.