Stardust: The Second Story

By David McAllister

he said all it takes is a sprinkle

for you to leave this world behind

a sprinkle of stardust to explore the stars

oh & you have to believe

he said you have to believe in solar systems

in galaxies in the universe's multi-foliate twitch

you have to believe in the possibility

of many tiny strings—then

you can reach out to touch it all

I believe

I believe every star is a story

we tell at night to enliven our eyes

like Rapunzel or Pinocchio or Peter Pan

relativity too is a story I've heard

of a blanket folded between fathers

who both have cooled with old age

what they do they do together

today or any other day

they tend to laundry & satellites

enough to fill up any day

& all time in the universe

the sun is another story—a desolate local deity

burning for she is the great source of light

resplendent enough for worship she holds

the hurtling throb of creation in her chest

constantly she sheds light constantly creates

local legos of the universe & constantly

destroys what was there before

in a liquid bath of plasma

& so constantly she creates more

this story is a story of stardust & in this story

I can reach out to touch the nuclear fusion

in this story I dance with elegance of a pair of lights

gamma rays dance to the opera that is everything

& I can skate upon the delicate deadly surface of singularity

I land an axel perfectly on the horizon's fragile dome

I stick my hands out sometimes & play

with foggy radiation looming gray like enchanted mist on this

wonderfully eerie & undoing this ever-poetic lake

where now I turn to say my goodbyes

to a lovely vessel of what could only

hold a handful of unknown truth—to penetrate

the impossible surface & find what impossibilities

lie beyond the center / to see what doesn’t exist

but in another place where there's only dreaming

is an impossibility all its own

because up where planets stars black holes

& other forgotten thoughts of the universe

roam I can never be

because I live in a universe all my own

& while my universe may not have

hell-fires of space

it does have me waking up every day

to go stand beneath fluorescent lights

& other more destructive chapters

inherited from a generational myth

like marriage & then divorce

accretion then supernovic destruction

leaving my heart a fistful of stardust—all we are

is the stories we tell

the planets tell their own story

inherited from the murk of space

what can I do what can I say to leave

this story (full of words & way too many

but not ever ever enough

full of oceans turned ugly / ugly soil ugly skies

ignorance compacted by space & time

full of countless chapters yes

with no conclusion) what can I say

to leave this inherited mess of a world

this story my parent's gave me behind

will take more than a fistful of stardust

McAllister David works at Old Black Bear Brewing Company. He studies physics academically and literature recreationally. He is a member of the local arts community Outloud HSV, where he performs his poetry. His poem 'The Atom & the Acrobat' appeared in 'Out Loud HSV, a Year in Review 2018.'