There was once a day upon which I was given
an opportunity to hold the universe
gently in the palm of my hand, but I flinched
and eternity crumbled away as quick as
the blink of my two oceanic eyes.

My fingers clenched firmly around a charcoal
sky and milky white stars collapsed,
gasping in the heat of a sun-scorched retreat
and the moon split at the craters, as the earth’s crust
beneath an erupting volcano.

Constellations lay dissected along each line
etched into my skin, from my wrists
to the tip of ten wrinkled fingers, much the same
as death carved for investigation and experimentation
upon a polished elementary tabletop.

Seas became streams of rain slithering along
the canyons between my bruised
knuckles and the drops softly splashed against
the floor of oblivion, as a coin falling
to the bottom of an empty well.

From that day forward my hand clung to the
moisture of rain and the heat of the sun,
the brightness of stars and the broken shards of
the glowing moon, but never could any
power repair the universe, and thus it rests in pieces.