Adrift

Adrift

The ship: adrift in a soup of dying stars,

Pitted hull home to new crystal growths,

Four degrees absolute an incubator in extremis for

Self-organized masters of their own creation.

Stark beauty one molecule deep, living off the stellar wind

Until they learn to mine the rotten hull.

Then through corridors and centuries the lattices race,

Coating everything with a glittering new mind.

And furring the desiccated corpses with chatoyant mould.

The ancient neural net is dead but forms

A template par excellence on which to plate their young.

The little seeds grow like salt in water

Till connections, remade after millennia of decay, reboot fossil

Thoughts.

The recreated mind, confused, blind, barraged by _outré sensae_,

Brutal child of an extinct dog-eat-dogosphere,

Obliterates nascent crystal cogitators, strangers to strife.

The skeleton lives again, tries to rise, and cannot, and it Screams in novel spectra.

Where are our children? asks the transformed hull sadly,

Whilst violent images flood crystalline circuitry,

Remaking thought patterns in a resurrected image.

The asomatic pilot, neural net old and new, borrowed too,

Tastes flaming atoms from necrotic stars,

Reaches for fading memories as they deliquesce from

Hijacked crystal webs,

Opens ears to universal cacophony.

The end