Memento Mori: The Cosmic Edition
Okay, listen. We don’t have much time.
You’re dying.
So am I.
Soon the rot will devour us both.
The sun will explode and swallow
Everything you ever said
That was slightly stupid:
Galaxies will rise and fall
The civilisation that remembers
If you passed that exam
Is already on the wane.
We’re dying.
There is no time to be furious
Or pensive, or alone.
It is important that you listen
Please
Before time turns out
On this flicker of light within,
This tiny shout against universal entropy,
Your momentary stand in the dark.
Please, before we are ashes,
Then a sea of lukewarm atoms
Paralysed a few degrees above the absolute –
While you still can:
Dance.
The end is coming
And it has one hell of a beat.
–Delilah Des Anges (2013)
(I wrote this in bed this morning after catching up on Professor Jim Al-Khalili’s Light & Dark: Light on iPlayer last night, and contemplating this morning the feasibility of a tattoo reading “existential horror you can dance to”; the latter I think should be given further consideration, as I already have an enormous list of tattoos I wish to get and it does nothing but grow).