Howard wrote of you in '27,
long before you were unseen:
a cosmic cadaver so bloated that
space spilled when you did, galaxies
swirling like maggots.
You are dead yet animate --
a great debate among those who know
of stellar collapse, the inescability of weight,
Hawking's praises in the brief Necronomicon.
You are no surprise though,
to those who know Howard's couplet.
If anything could eternally lie
or bring strange eons, it is you.

We are unaware until on your brink.
All that saves is the creeping
in our periphery, your servants piping
brightly, betraying your black name.
Your events pulse beneath your horizonal skin;
more for which to be grateful.
Without such cover your insides
would stretch out, pulping all existence.
Your equivalence is crushing in its density,
gravity your gravest curse,
binding all together
a man is a sun is a bug.
Your skin is our shield, protecting
from what lies within:
the key to Yog-Sothoth's gates,
the coming of time betwixt,
the death of predictability.

We condemn you as mindless vortex,
uncaring of what you devour even as
it gives you form. And so
Howard was right: only monsters
eat their mothers. Yet if the universe is to
last forever, your whirling jam finally throws off
more than it snatches -- a sink becomes a source,
birthing children as far flung as
photons, sonnets, Cthulhu.

We could lock you into label:
singularity, or
Azathoth the Eater of Worlds.
But you are scaled in
far bleaker freedoms:

beyond size
beyond age
beyond

Such are your dimensions,
great old one

Evidence of a Supermassive Black Hole
in NGC 1068