He felt the weight of countless stars crushing down upon him
though “down” was as meaningless as the rest of his life had been
up until the moment when he had veered the module off course
and strayed into the deep, deep dark at the heart of the Milky Way.

14 psych evaluations hadn’t revealed the black hole that dwelt within him
and desired to launch itself, the rest of his body
and billions of dollars of machinery and titanium
into the twilight core of the aether and perhaps spend an eternity
being slowly devoured.

As he drifted towards the center he was propelled
by invisible currents that pulled him and the silver raft
at velocities that no one had ever conceived of
to a place no one had ever understood.

As he sped further on, the time, relative to his own passage, was short,
an instant, and in that instant the rest of creation moved forward,
faster now, faster ever onward.

The stars shuddered and supernovaed like exploding soap bubbles
and eons passed on terrestrial planets and gas giants and icy moons
and it was still the same instant for the man.

The whole of his species evolved past recognition and dispersed
and condensed and evaporated.
New forms emerged and died out.
They created and destroyed
and disappeared all in the same instant.

He had been mad when he had set the course into the singularity,
in his madness he had savored the thought that he would achieve
a kind of immortality that nothing in the universe would ever know.

He was right, but he had not realized the eternity
he so desperately sought was only relative.
As the forever of the galaxy played out
and reached its final, bitter end
in the same instant that was his last.

© 2011 James L. Carey