When speculating: nothing ventured, nothing gained.
This is why speculation must become our enterprise.
What if ...there were no such thing as extraterrestrials;
rather, only post-terrestrials and pre-terrestrials?
What if ...the entirety of outer space contained no life;
and that only across happenstance could alien sentience
emerge before or after us across the vast oceans of time?
What if Earth were the virtual center of our creation?
What could that exactly mean, anyway?
Just who are we, to be referred to as our?
Do we belong to each other . . . or not?
Must each individual face oblivion alone?
We like to think of space as a wide open area,
like a sort of vast empty room; when in fact,
outer space really has no shape of that sort.
(It appears more like an intricate labyrinth
comprised of the narrowest interlinking
passages in an interminable array of
coiling gravitational twists and turns.)
Are the wide arcs of sprawled star points
spread out across our night skies really
in fact just the illuminated remnants
of long dead Hosts now reaching our eyes?
(If so, the only living portions of our universe
would be those branches of our Host—our galaxy:
These arms would extend from the Head of our star
in two spiraling directions; One, toward
the core of our Milky Way Tree; and Two,
toward the emptiness of the void to one side.
Both of these directions curve toward and
away from our blind spots. These extend past
the shoulders of our cosmic horizon. The stars
spangled and glittering across our night sky
remain a backdrop afterglow from the heat
death of long forgotten Suns still haunting us.
Then only the remaining body of our own galactic
Host must extend in two directions from our Sun;
The Vine to be glimpsed here and there sunken
brightly amid the glare of all the long lost systems!
