Celestial Wire (Poems and Fragments)

A series of train lines. Stretching to the outer rim. Crossing two star systems. Built before the age of star freighters. Now outdated. Some tracks were shut down, others lost to the incalculable dimensions of space. There’s still one operational line, home to a solitary space freighter rollin’ back and forth between cosmic time zones.

And when it can’t go anymore the line will close, the void left to decide its fate.

Nebulous gas cloud
flickers of auburn
dancing in its mist
meandering drift
across the rail line
space freighter momentarily suspended
on sheets of
auburn abstraction

It’s an empty station now. No one guards the box cars anymore. No one checks passes. If you want to hop on a box car, go for it. The driver doesn’t care. Won’t bother the loaders. The space freighter hasn’t long for this world. Might as well take a ride. Never be another one like it.

On the tracks
the only sound
the silent screech
of steel wheels punishing iron tracks
the only light
the alabaster sparks
of iron tracks exhausting steel wheels

Star freighters run the same routes as the space freighter, passing it by, leaving it in sub light slip streams. From a box car, the transient ships vent exhaust streams of orange and blue, blazing halos receding into deep space, as the ships plow through unfathomable star clustered furrows.

There’s a momentary pause. The star freighters freeze, before jumping to hyperspace.

Supernova blast
wave of dust cosmic
rattles box cars

Asteroid fields are the worst. Just pray one doesn’t hit your box car. Or the locomotive.

Phantoms of ancestral trains
haunt the rails,
trapped in orbit
their forlorn wrecks,
battered hulls frozen in
repeating trails
around the celestial wire

They are beautiful in their own way. Tons of scarred rock, in an aimless drift as if without weight, as per gravity’s rules.

Empyrean winds
invisible entwines
in wheels and gears.

Spectral friction
giving rise to
ethereal howls

Along the rails there’s a series of floating stops, suspended by azure rimmed jets. They are used for refueling and taking onboard items such as food. In the age of star freighters they are poorly maintained. As asteroid belts move through they are evacuated.

They are not long for this space.

Comets looping
ice laden arc
mercifully
spirals over
ancient rails
the beatific journey
rolls onward

End of the line. A dusty train stop on some back water world. Platform covered in crimson particles as loaders remove cargo from pock-marked box cars. Outside of the station its nothing but mountains tinged in shades of scarlet and deserts of auburn sands, a netherworld of underground colonies seeking safety from the roves of sand dragons.

Seek out a colony or get back on the box car and go back to where you came from. Your choice.

~~~

First picture found here: http://www.zastavki.com/eng/Space/wallpaper-18055.htm

Second picture found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star

Third picture found here: http://nicepicturescollection.blogspot.com/2010/05/space-pictures.html

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