Friday, September 30, 2022

The Tale of Time










  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