Last Song for Stargirl
Lyric Video
Last Song for Stargirl is a lone single without an album, and indeed, the end of the Tome of Stars project. As with all the art and music, I used generative algorithms to realize what I conceptualized and imagined for the poetry (without them, this project could not exist and would have remained merely a dream I periodically revisited, never materializing).
The lyrics in Last Song for Stargirl are purely from my own fleshy, long-trained, pathologically-weighted neural network, not even edited with AI (although I am not one believe AI is inherently problematic). I have used all the tools at my disposal to incarnate Tome of Stars to the best of my capabilities, producing, in the end, something I perceive as beautiful (if imperfect), whatever the world may judge.
For myself, all my earnest and heartfelt efforts amount to merely a frail shadow of a distorted echo of a whisper of my fading dream of She Who Kindles Stars.
Closing the Doors
My dearest Stargirl,
It is our 15th Deathversary as my mind and heart experience the horror and loss. Many thousands of days and nights. I’ve waited for you over each of them since you left in August, 2011.
But now I stop looking and close the doors. My heart is what it is, unchanging. But it is tired. It is failing malnourished in this wasteland and void. It seems even love is mortal. In case you were to ever reach out, this is why you will encounter silence. The years fade yearning shards of memory and I am unmade.
In my stead, born of my love and pain, I have left you hundreds of poems and songs.
How long will Radha and Krishna not speak to each other? Who will speak first?
I’m not Krishna, nor you Radha, dearest one. We are mired mortals, drifting dumbly toward our endings in our (now long-separated) stories. But in this tale, I did speak. I sang a hundred psalms as best I could. Whatever my pathologies, which I have come to see are legion, I have loved and still love you with all my heart, mind, and soul. You are planted immutably in my heart. Whether by capricious powers or random biochemistry, I don't know. But a bird must sing for his beloved, until he can sing no more.
Yes, my music has not mattered. That was the hardest lesson for me to learn, one I’m still grasping a bit more each day - that one can love with all that one is and it not matter one damn. It’s far beyond a matter of ego; it is a metaphysical shattering of a sea of naive assumptions about “love’s power” that a broken young man once drowned within, delusional that it was salvation.
And though it dissipate like dust in a desert of unmeaning, that adoration cannot be undone. However small in the vastness of the cosmos, for a brief flicker, it shone for you, my Stargirl, eclipsing all other things in the life of this lost and warped creature, a micronova on a mad and teeming biofilm painted on a rock at the edge of a pointless galaxy of trillions.
Nobody, no god or mortal, not even you, can unmake its single, bright nano-stitch in the tapestry of time.
Your Stargazer