Treading Water

Sacrifice

Vol. 3

Pretend

Soul Exchange

Wir Fahren

“Tome of Stars” is a 100 sonnet journey, equal parts art, therapy journal, and exorcism, both a celebration and an elegy, a single narrative arc tracing the birth and death of a relationship. All poetry by Stargazer. The verse and accompanying synthetic art and music are public domain, CC0, with no restrictions on use. Nothing is monetized. See below for links on how to access the print, PDF, audio, ePub, video, and music files. 
Website: https://www.tomeofstars.net/

The fifth Item of “Tome of Stars”, “Quixotosis”, marks the poet’s transformation into a sustained state of paradox with an enduring condition of impractical idealism born not from naive delusion but from its aftermath. Emerging from the frozen void of “Anemochory“, these sixteen poems depict a fractured self that has ceased resisting its nature, accepting permanent separation from the beloved while continuing to orbit her in love without expectation (and in the end, without hope) of return.

“Boxing Day, 2024” is a free verse lament marking the precise moment when the poet relinquishes his last hope of hearing again from his beloved, certainly in any fashion that could be meaningful in the raw essence his longing required. The poem is raw, disordered, and visceral, formally abandoning rhyme and meter to express emotional collapse. Anchored in the memory of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami—an event that had once reconnected them through the catalyst of global tragedy—the poem mourns the absence of a renewed contact on the 20th anniversary of that event. What begins as an invocation of grief and trauma concludes with exhausted defeat. The poem chronicles a vigil held in emotional ruin, where the silence of the beloved, now seen as definitive, is internalized as the final blow. The poet, having sustained fantasy for decades, at last allows it to die, not through anger or argument, but through absence and unacknowledged loss.

This poem does not further the relationship; it buries it. It is the moment the poet accepts, not by conviction but by exhaustive defeat, that his beloved will never return, never answer, and never truly loved him at all. In that sense, the poem does not merely end the “Quixotosis” section, but it ends the fantasy itself. “Scripture”, the meta-reflective epilogue to the collection, can only follow such death.

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Lyrics

Bone-shattered-heaven-damned lune
zombie-lurching months (campus dark and hunted light)
yourface yourlaugh yourwalk yoursmell

waking: (cold) empty-life-waltz hotel room laptop news
d-r-u-n-k mother nature’s black INFANTICIDE
one quarter million tombs befoul stirred seas

i broke unholy silences. i bled cross fiber optics
we touched. and wept. and vowed
never ever let love die

i choke on it now//\\twenty year deathversary
mourning every moment of our rot
continents sundered ——— i felt your heart tonight
((((*in timeless unspace*))))

ruined resurrection as you vomit infinite silence
rank guts a’sloshin’ o’er hateful shores
blinging our grave by cemetery seas

sorry, stargirl
i just couldn’t make it rhyme

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Internet Archive
Book of sonnets:
https://archive.org/details/tome-of-stars/

Music:
Item 1, Anthesis: https://archive.org/details/Anthesis/
Item 2, Senescence: https://archive.org/details/senescence_tomeofstars
Item 3, Sporogenesis: https://archive.org/details/Sporogenesis_TomeOfStars/
Item 4, Anemochory: https://archive.org/details/Anemochory_TomeOfStars
Item 5, Quixotosis: https://archive.org/details/Quixotosis_TomeOfStars
Item 6, Scripture: https://archive.org/details/Scripture_TomeOfStars

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