Last Chance Dance

If you haven't caught up with Poetry Thursday's new page, check it out. This week they're suggesting a prose poem. Nobody seems to be quite sure what that means, though. I guess this could be one.


It’s the Last Chance Dance. Electrons spin down to the hollow piping of the entropy flute. Hand in hand, King Rust and King Dust quadrille in slow time, in the empty ballroom of the universe. Over their heads, the Milky Way turns like a flattened disco ball with half the mirrors missing and dark matter leaking out of the cracks. At the edge of the floor a white dwarf in tattered harlequin rags juggles black bodies and speaks in sputtering radio noise.

The walls fold in, the spiral turns tighter. No oracles are given. The clocks on the wall are stopped, waiting for the hand of a princess or for new batteries. Mass is being sung at the Last Chance Chapel. Particles that used to dance around passion fires huddle over the ashes of mutual attraction. Space shrink-wraps itself into infinite layers of distortion around the
seed
seed crystal
grain at the heart of a raindrop
snowflake
pearl

and inside the manifold layers of the seed raindrop snowflake pearl the dance goes on and on, the Last Chance Dance, spinning faster and faster until it explodes in a thousand thousand colors of light and all creation spills back out into the empty ballroom and fills it to overflowing and bursts the walls

because God doesn’t color inside the lines.