by Shaun Lawton
You are a cipher in an alphabet
One letter itself comprised of an entire alphabet
It takes an alphabet outright to compose one singular figure you who are only one character in a word
The ideograms streaming through you
also produce a word with you
just as they eventually generate a phrase with you
and render you into a sentence
The syllabary running through your genetic code
also makes you into a complete paragraph
This takes at least a decade
as your story is being woven
around the loom of the Sun
After two decades you may grow into your own story
A very short story perhaps only a couple of paragraphs long
but not without its own punch line
By the time we each reach adulthood we are living examples of a sort of flash fiction
After a good and long life say double that then we'll transform into a short story or novella
If we double that and live into our eighties
we'll metamorphose at long last
into living novelties
of flesh and blood
When we die the book that became ourselves will dissolve in the earth having been reduced to the ash of a single character shed like so much snakeskin from this living alphabet
The Omega transubstantiates back into the Alpha
And so it goes an ever cycling process channeled through
the subatomic forces at the heart of the universe
which dictate the second law of thermodynamics
and bring about everything from an endless series
of big bangs right on down to this very moment
where I already having lived long enough
to have developed into a novella of living information
have been led to transcribe these thoughts here to you
like shadows onto the screens of your mind
You like me each one of us a single letter symbol word sentence paragraph in fact now many pages of a developing collection of stories interacting with each other in the most complex anthology that has yet been written in blood upon all of the pages of flesh and bone
Each one of us a chapter describing every permutation
of the one story that's been told since before the title
of The Tale of Time was established as the heading
for this account having captured in monograms
of the alphabet this single letter composed
outright as a page for you who are only one character
in a world being spelled out by each one of us
one singular mark at a time
