Vessel

In the 21st century
the world has become an engine.
Miles underground, the great dynamo
rages in the act of dreaming,
pouring out a violent music
through the caverns of the earth,
its energy doubling and doubling,
lost at the surface in a craze;
the lights of every city being born,
every ancient empire failing.

They are sparks of the great wheel,
a glinting in the eye of this
diver through an ebbing galaxy.
We are conduits, cells frying
in a bath of blue electric,
seeing each other's spasms and splits
in music, as it uses us
within its brief communications,
expressions of parts of thoughts.

We hear them, sometimes dreaming
at the fringes of our world,
asleep beneath the cliffs as waves
rattle over from the further shore,
we are carried back on this electron
into a history of atoms,
the biology of ancestral stars.