The History of the Entire World (or, The Ages.)

From what I remember, it was born growing.

It was born hot, expanding, glowing,

And the people were made of gold 

and of fire.

And it kept growing, it kept burning hot, bright,

And Luna came soon after to draw the waters around the shores at night,

As well as magic and childhood and mystery in the air,

And smoky towns with tiny mirrors in the sky.

Human Beings looked up and died looking up.

I walked the earth long and happily in those years.

Where I came upon folks singing, I sang in their midst,

And where I came upon folks weeping, I kept my distance but wept with them,

so they would know that I was a friend, which I was.

Then, while the moon set on the first age, I crawled back up to the stars, and I never really came back down again.

Cities came soon after that.

(That was when the world had only just begun to grey.)

I barely remember the first cities -

They were not cities in any modern sense.

Human beings had not yet figured out that you could live in cities.

What they did, you see, was that they gathered great stones and piled them on top of one another.

and kept piling and piling on top of each other.

Where one died, their body was picked up and molded into several new babies,

so that one day the work could continue.

Their intent was to reach heaven. They almost did a couple of times.

There was one man among them, I remember, Cartaphilus. He refused to die after the rest. 

After the Human Beings had used up all the stone of the earth in their tower, he sat at the top and looked past the stars and into my face. 

He vowed he would never die as long as the earth still faced the heavens.

I can see his bones even now, dried on that tower to the north and south and east and west of where I sit in the sky.

My memory fogs over after that. 

Human beings harnessed the early and ancient mists and magics and childhoods 

Given to them in moderation at the beginning, 

And condensed them into fuel and sugar to eat and snort and run their cars with. 

A curtain was pulled about the globe so that no more light reflected off it.

I have lost it in the night sky now. It could be wandering anywhere down there.

My final memory of that place is one from a waking dream of mine, or maybe it was something real that woke me briefly from a deep sleep.

I was standing on a cliff over the North Sea, 

And I was pushed backwards off of it by a flood of Human Beings

Spilling over the ledge.

I flailed in the hordes of Men and Women, trying to swim up the wave.

I only gave up when I realized that they never ended.

It was people, people, people, all the way from the sea to the sky.