Mike Allen

"I'm sorry to disappoint science fiction fans, but if information is preserved, there is no possibility of using black holes to travel to other universes. If you jump into a black hole, your mass energy will be returned to our universe, but in a mangled form, which contains the information about what you were like, but in an unrecognizable state."

—Stephen Hawking, 2004

Black holes hold their breath,
deny the urge to exhale
as life's pull grows frail;

speak at last in death
tall tales of their creation,
slow lives told in sighs;

slow gods' dying lies,
spewing misinformation,
hiding holocaust:

All the lives they've claimed
returned, recombined and maimed;
all escape hopes lost.

Damning stars, we curse
your crime: robbed of our chance to
slip the end of time

By day, Mike Allen works as a newspaper reporter covering criminal and civil trials; in his spare time, he's both President of the Science Fiction Poetry Association and editor of the poetry journal Mythic Delirium, thus ensuring he has no spare time. His newest poetry collection, Disturbing Muses, is out from Prime Books, with a second, Strange Wisdoms of the Dead, soon to follow.