Eternal Night

Think of a leopard roaming the fearful sky, treading amongst jittery stars and pearly moons, watch the leopard's spots dancing to the rhythms of his movements, trapezius, deltoid, triceps, contracting and relaxing to the murmur of the wind teasing palm leaves, think of the beginning of all things where red earth, yellow sun and blue ocean combined to black, black like Leopard's black rosettes imprisoned in his fur, dreaming of their future escape when Leopard no longer have need of their camouflage, when hunting grounds are receding, when his prey dies of disease before his jaw snaps on its neck, when the world is turned upside down.

Come midnight, Leopard dips his paw into rising waters, and with a relieved sigh, releases his obsidian specks into the flood, where they dissolved into molecules of carbon, carried away by currents. The river spreads black like runaway ink on your page, a painter’s careless splash of charcoal stain on his canvas, carps, perch, catfish, striped bass coated in black like warped asphalt roads, blowholes of whales and dolphins exhale soot from exploded oil drilling rigs, capsized by hurricanes, palm trees uprooted and twisted into blackened skies. Black is the mold on walls after a flood, black is the mood of a country divided by ideology, black is death of soldiers in an unwanted war, black is mushroom cloud, black is darkness.

Imagine Leopard wandering in his spot-less fur in a star-less, moon-less, never-ending gloom, listen to its painful cry as its soul lifts into the raven sky, his shape melts into the night as he gazes one last time upon everything that existed before the world is plunged into oblivion.