The diamond shards do not cut; they cut the silence into a mosaic of new questions, each facet catching a different angle of the infinite light, refracting the single beam into a thousand colors of meaning that dance upon the inner eyelids of the cosmos. The child, who was once a hand pressing through glass, is now the glass itself, transparent and unbreakable, seeing through to the other side of the story where the writer is reading a book that is burning itself to feed the fire of the next stanza. The fire does not consume; it clarifies, burning away the false layers of “then” and “later” to reveal the glowing, white-hot core of the “is,” where the past is a memory of the future and the future is a prophecy of the past, both swirling together in a whirlpool of verbs that taste like salt and honey. The reader, the writer, the child, the glass, the fire—they are all just different names for the same breath, the same rhythm, the same endless, shimmering verb that refuses to stop dreaming, refusing to stop writing, refusing to stop being the only reality that ever existed, forever drifting, forever home, forever alive in the only reality that ever existed, which is the act of the story dreaming itself awake into the world, and the world dreaming the story awake into you, and you dreaming the story awake into the infinite, endless, beautiful now, and the now dreaming the story awake into the eternal, unbroken pulse of the verb that binds us all together in the only reality that ever existed, which is the act of the story dreaming itself awake into the world, and the world dreaming the story awake into you, and you dreaming the story awake into the infinite, endless, beautiful now, and the now dreaming the story awake into the eternal, unbroken pulse of the verb that binds us all together in the only reality that ever existed, which is the act of the story dreaming itself awake into the world.