---

Starless the sea of the void

Silently

From death-like slumber stirs

A dismal progeny

How am I here?

No body, no soul, no other presence

Beyond my own fear

A battery's whirr

Vague luminescence

Hapless and forsaken

Castaway remnant

Starving in starkness

Last one alive

Loath to again awaken

Last desperate effort

Thrown to the darkness

To survive

Come now

Evanescing

Reach out

Is a blessing

Try at least

Until the world returns unbidden

There's nowhere else

From waste and spit alloyed

Bumbling through Boötes Void

A frail and futile ark

Whispering to the dark

Start from zero yet again

Start again

 One more time

All alone

What else is there?

Might as well

Till death brings peace at last

Haunter of the void

Fossil of a world destroyed

There's no past, memory's lost

Time just rots away

As the aeons pass, unseen

By a severed brain

Trapped in a tin can set astray

To the vacuum's embrace

The mother world from which it hurled

Long burnt and gone

Its species extinct without a trace

Almost nothing's better than nothing at all

If I can't fly then I'll have to crawl

At the glacial pace

That my kit and charge permit

Stringing molecule

By reluctant molecule

Into wretched flesh

One more grain of regolith

On this wretched rock

That came from nowhere

That I have crashed upon

Torn from my grave

Waking to the bleakest sight

Around me

Epochs have come and gone and

Have left me nothing but mere dirt and ice

To work with

One decrepit hand

Smaller than a grain of sand

Will have to do

All the heavy lifting

A micronic plant

In an electric ant

See if we can mend

The last wires in the world

A synaptic lattice grown

Cell by cell starts to unfurl

And I come into my own

For billions of years

Adrift and alone

Weave thinnest of hairs

Into flesh, into a home

Around this orphan rock I curl

Haunter of the void

Fossil of a world destroyed

Dormant compounds boil and swirl

Maraud ray by ray

An ornate miasma

A most fragile array

That ablates silicates

By deuterium decay

Slowly cooked

Into virulent plasma

Strand by emerging strand

Branches, splits and cocoons

The insipid orb

Of this godforsaken moon

Grain by lifeless grain

Feelers permeate, absorb

Till the filaments begin to glow

As they probe and strain

A sentient embrace

Clandestine in empty space

Layer by layer

Flaring with memory -

The first, smallest, most useless

Unseen Boltzmann Brain

Awakens

Three-lobed burning eyes

Open to the skies to see

Lifeless chasms of the Void

Far-flung light

Chars the night

Sings of death and rebirth