The Barguest Coach. Pete Dymond

“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/

In the classical margam of bharatanatyam, the varnam is the recital’s centerpiece, its longest and most emotionally charged performance. In “Tome of Stars“, the varnam appears as the twenty-nine-poem section “Senescence”. Following the exaltation of Anthesis, the beloved as a celestial goddess, love now descends from the stars into the gravity of human frailty. 

This sonnet emerges from the inner monologue of a fictional character in one of the poet’s novels, though its emotional architecture is grounded in the poet’s own lived experience of devastating romantic loss. The novel’s chapter that inspired the poem was itself one of many attempts by the poet to exorcise that loss through art. 

The sonnet explores a landscape of emotional annihilation, where absence becomes palpably existential, and even death is stripped of metaphysical resonance in the shadow of grief. It dramatizes the unbearable disjunction between what once was in love, intimacy, and experienced transcendence, and what now remains: void, silence, and spiritual suffocation. 

The title evokes a cosmological collapse and a psychological implosion, fusing the concept of intense gravitational density with the image of an irrevocable inner unraveling. In the final couplet, the speaker pleads not merely for the return of the beloved, but for the restoration of meaning itself, as her presence had become the very axis upon which his spiritual survival depended.

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Lyrics

Let darkness close; foul fangs in throes confine.  
I fear it not—no night could match the dread  
Of spirit’s void, where her star’s soul should shine,   
Or chill my heart, as light by absence bled.

What terrors hunt that I do not endure?  
What unlight blacker than her empty space?  
Should shadow bring its blight, devoid of cure,  
I know that even death dies in this place.

I pray for dawn, and beg the whispered vow  
She left in love afore, sung pure as flame.  
Although I drown in famished silence, bowed,  
Her light could blaze, and I might breathe her name. 

I blindly chant through hell’s eternity:
“My dearest Stargirl, please, come back to me.”

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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

Bandcamp:

Item 1, Anthesis: https://stargazer-elentirmo.bandcamp.com/album/anthesis-item-1-of-tome-of-stars
Item 2, Senescence: https://stargazer-elentirmo.bandcamp.com/album/senescence-item-2-of-tome-of-stars
Item 3, Sporogenesis: https://stargazer-elentirmo.bandcamp.com/album/sporogenesis-item-3-of-tome-of-stars
Item 4, Anemochory: https://stargazer-elentirmo.bandcamp.com/album/anemochory-item-4-of-tome-of-stars
Item 5, Quixotosis: https://stargazer-elentirmo.bandcamp.com/album/quixotosis-item-5-of-tome-of-stars
Item 6, Scripture: https://stargazer-elentirmo.bandcamp.com/album/scripture-item-6-of-tome-of-stars

Running To Stand Still (Remastered 2007)

U 2