Chimera

A Poem

The Great Day of His Wrath by John Martin, painted from 1851-1853

i want to play in the cosmic lace

i want to be the red storm

the starstuff i was before i was born

i want to arc like comets

to level planets by day

i want to seize gravity by its law,

by night, knit human DNA

i want to make moons by splitting the atom

until it feels nerve-splitting pain

i want to make it out of yarnballs and lintflakes

things so unimportant as to not having anything to their name

i want rings like Saturn

to be stacked like a coffee stain

if i take my eyes off the milkyway

will the stars blink, blackout someway

or dip off like driftwood, or a tumbleweed

to where ships sink, cave, turn to steam

once every man is dead, the cell not dormant but instead

haunting like the hollow of an empty head

will the universe just cede, cease to be

or repeat like an awful night spent in a dream

or will it stop like a pendulum, arm stuck to one side

or digest like it ought to have eaten itself inside

with acid more powerful than a nuclear battery

white as before thought, white as the absence of memory

i want power, but i’m just a girl

i can’t be a djinni, with wishes enough for nebulae

but i’ll tell you this, i deserve to be

i came as a chimera, more abstract than history

but it takes my observation for anything to exist

so maybe I am responsible for this

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