Manifest

I can't sleep like this.

Stars dart over the insides of my eyelids,
they smash like billiard balls:
Saturn cracks open,
Neptune is flung into a blackhole.
Corner pocket.

I call it before it happens,
the black hole explodes,
spitting solar systems and galaxies out like vomit.

I make my own constilations.

Mark's eyes right there
by the little dipper.
They're bright like when we were young,
but fade the more I look at them.
The stars droop together and burn out
like Mark
dousing himself in gasoline the night he lit the match.

And there's my grandmother's cane,
her cigarettes,
her breathing machine,
like waves the stars now gather up and down in passing crests,
then they flatline.

I forget where I am in the universe.

Planet hopping now,
I find myself alone.
The stars culminate into one bright flash,
lights out.

Everyone is gone and I stare into the void.
All of existence is hushed into
a whisper,
a secret withdrawn.

I wonder if not all of space
is really just a firmament,
and maybe we'll never reach them.
I hope we never do.
I don't want them to change.

I like them better when they're easy to grasp
all at once,
I like them better
when they are Mark
and my grandmother
and me.