The Tale of Time

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