Maxwell I. Gold
i. Tick
Closer, drawn inward passed the steel, bone, and rickety pieces of thought-clumps that collected at my feet I watched the old stars wither below me—whisper and cough, their metallic innards too soft to churn, too slow to push one moment longer.
Tick,
throb,
and crash,
Followed the rhythmic mechanization of the stars around spherical sundries of a lost rust-ball that was the universe, empty and something else staring deeper, strained, and cracked like my body as I walked along the old staircase listening to the music of old forges and forgotten places—
ii. Throb
Where some ancient mass, yes, too familiar and anxious, wider with undulating quickness, it blinks, and twitches, covered in thorns and emerald shields—prepared to welcome me beat by beat, minute by terrible minute as if my soul were composed of copper or nickel, and surreptitiously stripped of its elemental reason, oxidized by that which was most terrible and indifferent.
Too soon I felt the unreasonable weight of existence press upon me like a glaive as I was cut down—another thought-clump, trapped betwixt the hands of that old clockface;
tick,
throb,
and crash.
iii. Crash
Past the old crumpled arms where below me—no whispers or coughs escaped—embers of smoke bent upward from the scarred time-body. Forsaken by the dark umbrage of an unspoken terror I saw the shattered clockface swallowed by a horrid mass whose lidless form; ne’er shut compressed at the center everything, endlessly beating,
tick,
throb,
and crash.