I
He has hands and feet now.
And eyes that can close off the world to such a limited view.
Look at the sun and it is bright,
Even when the sky shifts to his other sight,
That warps the fabric of space into view.
Gravity bends around and around the star burning above,
Trapping his gaze under its twisting fire.
He forces the vision away, blinking
Once and then twice, then thrice while it lingers.
He breathes in and out
Tucks back a strand of hair glowing red even if there wasn’t light.
Humans see the brightness,
The nameless shade slipping through their thoughts
Slithering down their necks, causing the hair to rise.
When it catches his eye,
When he lets it catch his eye
The dying red star, the one he wasn’t finished slurping down,
Glimmers in those strands of hair.
II
Once, a very long time ago yet so recently in his memory,
There was a hole, gaping and black
Not quite as empty as humans like to pretend that they are.
Stars and planets, bits of rock with life clinging to the surface
Sliding down, down, down what was once a mouth.
That’s all, everything he was, only a mouth to devour.
Until—
His hands clench.
His hands, his feet, his eyes
The mouth closed so very tight
Even if past the lips only round little teeth reside and not
A bottomless abyss.
He might be wrong about that, though
Never could quite build the courage to face a mirror and open wide,
To see if that echoless emptiness still waits inside this carbon-construction of a body.
He breathes in and out, feels the air slip into lungs
And out again unlike those stars and planets from so long ago.
How was it? How did he become like this?
During that time when his appetite was vast,
Yet he couldn’t have been larger than a drop of ink on a page.
How did he grow, yet become so contained
That the light can strike off this form and not fall into him forever like it did then.
III
There once was an item of science and a priest of old—
The light, the light that doesn’t fall in like the other rays slips its fingers
Into the maw, pulling its jaw open to the point that it
Cracks and realizes that
Its eating, that’s what it—he is doing
That’s all he’s doing, and he wants more
Not more to eat, but more to existing.
And the light pulls out the half-eaten star,
Weaving the red and the orange and the yellow
Into strands that settle past shaking shoulders.
The memory of what he once was presses down upon him as
He wraps his arms around
Those shoulders that only shiver now
Under the weight of boundaries
That keeps the people walking by from falling into him.
He looks back up
Searching for the light that molded him into this shape.
The sun is too dim though, the rays brushing too weakly against his face
To be whatever god forced him into human limbs.
Who needs character notes and outlines when you can just write a poem. In other words, this is a brief and self-contained concept poem about the personification of a black hole.
