In my torturous dream,
an unkindness of ravens
descended upon me and began
slow-motion pecking
the sight from my eyes,
the color bleeding out first
in rainbow rivulets until Earth & sky
were just a fading daguerreotype
then turned to a river of flat black
flowing into a gloomy sea
of expanding unbearable darkness,
imploding me and everything else
from the catalog of existence:

planets & stars, laughter & love,
every song ever sung and musical note played,
every word written and spoken in every language,
dreams dreamed both happy and sad,
all animals extinct and extant,
undiscovered alien civilizations
and their gods, art, and history too—
all of it, every particle in the universe,
collapsing in a swirl of gravity
exponentially eradicating space
in the gathering gyre, a rare
inflection point of perverse physics,
a black magic trick, packaging it all up
within a tidy singularity where nothing
remained to see or hear, smell or feel;
no more pleasure nor pain,
no further creation and destruction;
not even a darkness to meditate upon
in this empty horror of horrors
with the universe ending
not in a whimper or a bang
but simply vanishing
as though it had never been.

From start to finish, the entire tragedy
unfolded in about 20 billion years,
but felt much longer in the tortured
unkindness of my brief nightmare.
When I woke to sunlight
and the primary colors of red, green & blue
flooding back to refill my eye’s vitreous humor,
I bowed my head in prayer
to any god who’d listen, vowed again to live
everything fully before it all disappeared.

©Scott Dewing