The Big Chill

I found the string that hung from a bulb in my attic,

Swinging sideways with no air to push it

Someone had left it on long, long ago

But the curled up filament inside had gone on burning,

Pulsing with the milky coldness of a dying nebula

I pull, and with a click

There is darkness everywhere.

My pupils close up, as if some scared onlookers inside 

Had pulled their shutters fast together

And cowered in the shadows beneath their bed

I was blind

But I could feel the heat of every star go out

click

like that, just one, a slight sounds of scraping metal

glaciers form as fast as it takes me to think

the ice crawls up my walls, octopus tendrils

it fastens like a glue I've never seen before,

and the blood in my veins halts

my heart shrieks to a stop in mid-pump

glistening in blue stone that even a diamond couldn't cut

the dog was standing outside when it happened

and he saw, in half a moment,

the restless kilns in the chest of the sun slow down--

the stars snipped out in a second

but the sun was like halogen lamps on my sister's desk

it exhaled, the lush crimson of its life

leaving nothing but an empty walnut

like when all the flavoring is gone form a snow cone

And then the sun becomes darker than the universe,

Darker than the absence of light

The lava that had once danced mellifluously through its sizzling pores

hardened into midnight canyons

Prometheus, who had hid the sun in his rucksack and carried it off to the

Milky Way,

He weeped, and sought a place of a little more light

Deep in the caverns of Pluto

We were all lumps of anti-life, 

Of something colder than 

deep freeze and permafrost

As I stood, suspended in my sightless, icy orb

I felt the universe disappear,

With only the legacy of a black hole.