"The Star Chutes and The Worlds Below"
A fine, swirling mist.
Massive strings of hot, cosmic space stuff.
Rings of blue hot radioactivity.
Crisp cracks of radio chatter.
The cold expanses of starry, black nothings.
In space, a light blue gray speck of space station.
Planets thick with choking atmospheres.
The multitude of debris and ghostly particles of worlds long past.
The painful freeze of disintegrating energy in the shadows of heavenly bodies.
Many men and women drawn bright white against black like little dots of spit in space.
A sun.
Many suns.
Stars of globed, orange fire, pulsing and alive, each with a place to sit.
This is their home.
City-sized blasts of space metal rotating slowly in an insane tumble.
Hair-like streams of fading space gas, the contrails of the quickly moving.
The blackened and fired morsels of silhouetted earths.
The ancient, the storied.
Small points of lacked light blotting out the surfaces of nearby stars.
The pull and struggle of time against the weight and the vertiginous relativity of objects, the confused distance seconds travel through space with no one in it.
Distance:
The idea of distance between the worlds.
Vast stretches of things with nothing nearby to tell the difference.
Many things in much space with little outward importance.
Ideas of destinations as things set aside,
islands of reality, the disconnection of the crucial.
In it all, white spots.
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