Cracks in Time

written by

Alexis Little

Continuum

I see it! I see it!

A single drop of water,

rippling across the surface of 

infinity!

It echoes in a sonorous cavalcade,

rising and falling with a 

basilisk’s roar.

The world shakes,

events puddle together,

and the order of us

shimmers away.

Settling

Into the silent eaves of temporal waves.

We fall in line

until the next tide

pulls us away again into the chaos

of the coalescing sea.

Flurry

A sweet, charming sprinkle    of downy white

fallen dormantly     atop the hillside.

What quiet countenance,    what silken secrets

did it hold?    Did it hold

the key to her    own unknowns?

Only the soft-spoken  frost knew

But its voice died    come spring,

its life puddling    into the earth.

Phoenix Fires

Embers

like fairy lights

Sparkling, twinkling one by one

Newborn brilliance in a world of dark

Crackling, popping, *krak, krak, krak!*

The calls of a thousand shrieking birds

Swallowed up into the sky

They rise, dance, blinking in and out

Of existence

One by one, bristling bundles of endless flame

Peter out into

Silence

The world grows dark again

The world grows cold

But the embers within the ashes

still dream

Dream of a new life waiting for them

Black ash and dusty soot with tiny lights 

Of eventual conflagration

Sit still, patient.

Their time will come.

Iridescent Mirror

The evening dwindles into pinpricks of amber frames

Stars take the spirits and rise into the celestial frames

Waking dreams of foolish tyros

Unable to see past their adolescent frames

To the living, death is a hound on an eternal hunt,

 Shadows rippling against its blackened frames

Sea and heaven meet; their union mismatched

The pillars crumbling under the world’s shambled frames

Fallen to the shore of gravity’s edge

Where did we go around these shattered frames?

Fabricated Flavors

Frivolous frolic finds floundering,

failing flavors of frenetic foam flowers, flaccid

from foreshadowed fermentation. Forthwith,

friends, for frenzied flavors of felonious fear foretell

fractious foes forming from frontiers unfounded.

Forward, fortuitous family,

for fading fables follow

from faceless fabrications.

I Would Not Trade

you belong here,

not as a prize of soft-scaled aristocrats,

nor of an item of hard-shelled merchants

I would not trade

for pence or nickel,

pound or rupee,

for no common currency holds the value 

you carry

something status cannot touch

never to be inflated or influenced

but as something more than value

to the place where antiques truly live

in the heart.

Across the Time

Bearing down with all my might

With fangs of gleaming fire,

Hunters fell that fretful night

Scorned by this unruly pyre

Humans, egotistical things

Who think the world is theirs to command

My head is their bounty, a bounty that rings

"Hail the emperor, ruler of heaven and land!"

Years have passed, my strength with it

My time has finally neared

The hunters come, but I resist

Come at thee without fear!

Great swords crunch, an axe slides through

between the gaps of my chest and heated heart

They've done it, I realize, as the wounds ring true

My life in their hands, my spirit left to rot

The Big Bang

For a moment, in the sea of space and the finite sands of eternity, everything grew still. An exaggerated swagger of unknowing, buckling under the weight of its own existence. A blistering build-up of emotions of atomic proportions. Something was coming, no, something was leaving.

The end. 

One by one, stars fizzled into the dark, a cosmic shower of hapless explosions. Some died as they lived, going out in a blaze of glory, their deifying light shining in the cosmos. Others had quietly fallen asleep, splitting apart and forming into newer forms of life - these were neutron stars, more volatile versions of their former selves. Those too would fade, collapsing in on themselves and swallowed up in the hubris of their singularity. 

Little by little, the collective became none. Flame became spark, and spark became nothing. And nothing became a ceasing void. The universe, so vibrant and bustling with life, had come to a standstill, an untimely erasure.

Then, a flash. Time took its first breath as if it hadn’t just taken its last moments ago. The progenitors of the once living bodies of planets past and future, atoms, matter and antimatter, dazzled against the black in a new struggle for control. Their battles would be the catalyst for a new age, bespeckled pinpricks of light hatching from their wars and flying into the beyond.

From the ashes of one void came the birth of another plane, wrenched from the inner workings of pen and paper and the mind of the writing god.  

Singularity

We live in pockets 

of time

in any given moment of

our lives.

Strands of memories

spaghettified

into a minutiae of spacial

inequity and motion, lost

in the fabric of the forgotten

and the remembered. 

Cauldron of Truth

My hands lay on the page for the umpteenth time that night. The pencil refused to cooperate, the keyboard taunting my intellect. I sighed, glaring at the blue and white screen in the cover of night that had since. My work was due tonight, and my head was empty with the white noise of voided inspiration. At this rate, I wouldn’t be able to put anything down on a page, much less pull anything out of my normally full cauldron of ideas. I closed my laptop lid and notebook, sighing in defeat, flopping on my mattress. Score one for procrastination, frequent killer of my muse. 

Forcing inspiration was a path to self-destruction. It was like taming a wild animal: it took time and patience, a certain withdrawal from the normal approach of making peace with a human, a delicate balance. If you came at it too aggressively or too meekly, it would run and you would lose it forever. If you hurt it, you’d lose all the progress you’ve made. The muse was there, watching in wait, a growling tiger stopping my approach. It wasn’t ready, not while it was recoiling from its last bout. I didn’t blame its caution. The muse was bested many times over the course of the class, exhausted, but unwilling to stay down. It was more suited to more rigid prey: prose. As it tore into it, I wrote with a fresh passion. With poetry, it was prey that could fight back. Sometimes, the fight was a win, and something good would come out of my work.

 Most of the time, however, it was a bust. 

I scrolled over my previous works, wondering what could be done. I wasn’t a poet by nature, and I tended to despise it with an ire of irritation. No matter how many poems I read or wrote, no matter how many examples of professional poetry I annotated, I could never truly wrap my head around it. It befuddled me, frustrated me. With prose, there was structure, a format that, while it could be changed, stayed relatively the same. Poetry did not follow those rules, and the rules that it did have broken on account of creative liberties of the writer. My muse agreed with me wholeheartedly, something that was rare nowadays. We were hardly of the same mind anymore. 

I decided to give one last check to the poems that I’ve done, unwilling to write anything new - I doubted I was going to write something awe-inspiring within the span of an hour. Of all the pieces that I’ve made, all came up short. I sighed again, giving up on that too. What was I to do in the span of an hour? I didn’t want to call it a day and just be done with it. And I couldn’t think of any hearty revisions for them either.  I grumbled and grumbled, frustration peaking-

And then, just like that, a drop of water spilled from the empty cauldron of ideas.

It was a brief second that it fell, an inconsequential moment in space and time, but it was enough to startle me into action. My hands raced to the laptop and I quickly opened up the doc I was writing on previously. I could see it in my mind’s eye. My muse, now fully alert, could also see it, could feel it between its paws. But my muse was perplexed; it wasn’t its typical prey that it could chase until it died under the weight of its own existentialism or it had been fully caught. In fact, this wasn’t prey at all. What was this, this abstract object it held in its claws?

But whatever it was, the muse knew not to harm it as I wrote. 

Normally, its hunting fed its strength, which in turn fed my drive to write, which kept the cauldron of ideas brewing. Now, I had the power to write a whole universe if I wanted. That moment showed me something important, something that I grasped to this day:

A single drop of inspiration could form a mighty tide of worlds at your fingertips.