Black Hole Over Your Shoulder

It’s mostly imagination, after all,
Names and numbers leading you
To where your flesh will never go.

You strain to picture the thing,
The death where experience turns
Runny and flows impossibly.

You work on it in teams, hundreds
Of people with thousands of machines,
All kinds of calculations and telescopes,

A work extending over lifetimes,
Cumulative, grand, unfinished, gothic,
The Great Black Hole Cathedral,

So that any one of you, little body,
Little beastie, little flesh, can sit and think
Of an experience beyond experience

Looming in the dark, never to be seen,
Directly witnessed, a mouth, a collection
Of mouths, of thoughts that eat their own.