SithLore

“Graphite Memories and Stardust Veins”



There’s not enough pages in this journal.
I could draw for days,
graphite murders flying from the binding.

There isn’t enough wall space in this hall.
Weathered hands turned gray,
Stenciled birds ascend wallpaper, winding.

There’s crop circles growing from the pages,
I should wake, I can’t.
I’ve been drawing homesteads in the hallways.

Etched family portraits with blurry faces,
watching. I recant,
but what unveils them, undoes me always.

This gallery of not quite memories,
is it worth the weight
of shine in my veins keeping me in place?

Magic in my blood, show me if you please,
how can I be great,
wasting time on a past I can’t retrace?

I inhaled stardust, but it burned my lungs.
There’s constellations
on my lash lines, embedded in my eyes.

Balancing on wires I myself strung,
cauterization
from arms, from mouths, through breath, through blood, to mind.

It heals and harms, I’m giving up starlight
for clearer faces.
For those beyond my incomplete pages.

Walk with the trees who know far more than I.
Hold hands, lock gazes.
Dance with a lord for the war he wages.

Watch over the child who surpasses me.
Set free the leopard.
Retether the bonds buried in glimmer.

Glint heart beating, smiles like coyotes.
Both beast and shepard,
Part midnight, daylight, and all that glitters.

I think I remember a sunrise.


-A page from Kress's journal smudged with a glimmering substance.

The wizened currator's hand brushed away the sole tear that had dropped onto the display screen which magnified and translated the physical tome beneath.

This page was his favorite in the collection, an archive spanning thousands of years. The specific entry, for example, had been written centuries before his own birth and yet remained a constant comfort to him in his eight decades of service to the collection.