Poetry: Where light never goes

By PJ “Starling” Letourneau

Motherless baby
Fatherless son
A spark in the void
Where once there was none

I needed a King
I needed a Queen
To call off the war
Inside of my being

I needed a truce
To this horrible war
From the battles that raged
Outside my front door

I am weary and worn
From the war that’s within
From the countless long battles
I could so rarely win

I’ve toiled on for eons
And eons again
Being cut down and born
Being born and then dead

Why would I choose
A life of neglect?
Of hoping and wishing
Parallel lines intersect

A life with no hope
A life barely lived
My life was discarded
Rotting from within

Motherless baby
Fatherless son
A love came to be
Where once there was none

A love came to be
From a life of neglect
From the dark came a spark
From the twigs … came a nest!

So love in the Universe
Is thus not conserved!
From pure darkness came light
From the egg … came a bird!

A bird that descended
From great lizards that ended
When meteors rained
From great flood swept away

The lizards that crawled
Out of the sea
And fought to persist
With brain and with fist

For eons and eons
Of life eating life
An orgy of death
And unending strife

Each eon a layer
Of carnage and dread
That was cut down by time
And raised from the dead

This great churning of life
That is seething in blood
From the eons of rage
And then drowned in the floods

From each layer of rock
Made from lizards of old
That were cut down by time
And reduced into bones

In the rock, over eons
A clear crystal grows
From the bowels of darkness
Where light never goes

I was desperate for light
In the cold and the dark
A hunger so painful
The pain made a spark

A hunger so deep
A hunger so wide
I bed down for winter
It was too cold outside

From inside that seething
Mass of destruction
Came crystals so ordered
Light felt no obstruction

A crystal from chaos
A crystal from rage
Could channel the light
Like a bow in the rain

PJ “Starling” Letourneau is a passionate advocate for neurodiverse humans. He writes a monthly newsletter Unprogrammable where he unpacks his experience being late-diagnosed Autistic at 42. PJ has a graduate degree in computational physics, and has had a 20+ year career as a software developer.