Blue Sunrise

An apocalypse of light

A few of you¹ have referred to my writing as poetic. Ha! Joke’s on you. The shameful truth is, I actually am a poet. In a previous life, I was a mildly notorious slam poet in my home town, what you might call a localebrity. I drifted away from that scene after a few years, distancing myself once the dark cloud of wokeness started strangling it. But there are a few pieces that I’m still somewhat proud of, and Blue Sunrise is definitely one of them.

I wrote this during kind of a dark time in my life, as probably comes through. The direct inspirations for the piece were Byron’s Darkness, and Larry Niven’s Inconstant Moon. The former, if you haven’t read it, is a gory description of what happens to the Earth and its inhabitants after the Sun ceases to shine. The latter is a science fiction love story describing the last hours on Earth after the Sun goes supernova. In Blue Sunrise, the Sun doesn’t blow up, but rather gets replaced with a blue giant star. Those stars can be hundreds of thousands of times brighter than the Sun. At those levels of intensity, light becomes a physical force.

The text is below, but I encourage you to listen to it, as it was really written with auditory performance in mind.

Blue Sunrise

Sunrise ... a dragon flaring phosphorous wings burning the clouds to ashes that fell up like hot snow.

For on this day when the Sun rose, it woke up blue, and brighter than a thousand summers in the desert combined at high noon presiding over dunes of molten glass whose iridescent depths refracted the smoke of grass, trees, and city towers twisting into sluggish steel tributaries feeding asphalt floods under mists of plastic and bone sparkling with rare earths from cell phones swirling together into cyclones in flight from morning like damned souls turning in horror from the judgement of the light, towards their natural home in the witching of the night,

Where fingers pointed disbelieving at a lunar crescent licked by flaming tongues of sapphire, incandescent even through lightning crawling like rivers filled with snakes between thunderheads spiralling visibly into space that caught a glow that came from everywhere, while below many panicked phone calls ended in dead air, in a wave of despair deeper than any mere melancholy, a useless prayer to be with those they could no longer reach that unleashed inner demons to run in ecstatic shrieking riot through streets and fields,

While beneath sub-basements were unsealed by a desperate few who instinctively knew the moment the moon turned blue survival meant escaping the day, further determined down to be the only possible way, and so with pics and shovels they frantically brought the fight against earth and time – exhausted to a one they too soon died only moments after the rest, once the shade fled to the West and the inferno on the surface steamed bones clean of flesh as the solar right to know peeled through concrete, soil and rock to reveal their remains to its gaze the same way it unlocked the graves of the recently lost and forgotten followed by that long fossilized in the strata of ages.

In the antarctic winter, the last beings alive stared at a horizon shining like a diamond tiara for a sky where auroral bridal veils wrapped around hurricanes that rolled in like frost giants storming bifrost, disgorging hot black hissing not-raindrops that hit the glacier like a serenade of gunshots around a research station above the ancient ice capping Lake Vostok where two scientists laughed in bitter disdain as their colleagues went mad by degrees of denial and bargaining, then in disgust with the pointlessness of arguing turned to one other and confessed that they'd had a thing for the other one for a ... oh, you too?

And coupled on the spot, clothes flying, flesh made world as tears flew between kisses cast like frenzied apologies for not risking action on hidden passion when they'd still had more time to convert clock ticks to kairos in one another's eyes....

Mouths open, the rest watched boiled oceans billow out in slow motion, a ringwall of wind sailing on light ... as the air left they let fly with it a wailing cheer, for it was so much worse than any permitted belief that fear had no meaning and here they were, as the Earth became a comet, to see it!

In the midst of this, ignoring them and all of this in bliss the lovers giggled, gripped, shuddered, cuddled, then drowned huddled together in a puddle of slush toxic with the mingled remains of everything new and old, artificial and living, mixed now too at the end with last conceived human beginning, a blastocyst that survived until its mother's sunken corpse was eaten by a rising swarm of blind fish of a species believed to be extinct, which became so by poisoning before Spring, when the Sun rose, and stripped the Earth's last secrets bare, left exposed and alone without care.

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1. OK really just Jay.