Each night he sleepwalks,
dreams of arranging stars,
craves a conversation with the universe.
His red dwarf alphabet
blinks a primordial desire to discover
a space syntax
to connect far flung molecules of life.

As he walks, he watches the sky
for a cosmic letter addressed to him
in the trail of an asteroid’s blood lines,
a comet’s flare, or bubbles from fossilized orbits.
Lover of dark spaces, he would turn off the moon,
glare that outshines the galaxies’ faint signs.

But at breakfast,
his memory is a black hole. Caffeine-stuttered,
sun-stunned awake, exhausted as meteorite ash,
he stares at his alphabet cereal
and wonders,
why it keeps spelling something cryptic
in the open mouth of milk.