Thursday, June 9, 2022

Chisel Poem

 Noah awoke in the dark, no lights being required for a ship whose occupants were all supposed to be in suspension. He lay there for an unmeasured length of time, until he was sure that no one else would awaken, that it was only him, that there had been a mistake, and that he was now the sole resident of a light-hugging sarcophagus filled with those sleeping so deeply they were legally dead.

After the sobbing, the praying, and the screaming, he sought only to escape. He drowned himself in fiction of every medium, the more colorful the better, for decades. Until finally he realized he was closer to the end of his life than the beginning, and considered he could still leave some sort of legacy. He found a power tool leftover from the ship's construction behind a bulkhead, and began to engrave his thoughts into the surface of the ship. Every floor, ceiling, and wall became his parchment as he wrote a single massive poem encompassing his life, his thoughts, and the dream that had been denied him.

The other passengers awoke to find their ship transformed, and they took his poem with them onto the new world.

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