I saw myself before I was born,

before my first digits twitched,

before the first beats of my heart,

before the chance meeting of my parents,

before theirs did,

and before them,

Etched in t he ancient rock,

imbedded in the mountains of time,

the many faces of species long since passed,

and the many yet to come,

the ash of the forgotten ones dead so many Moons ago,

crushed and sedimented,

Passed the Moon's time,

further than the Earth's archaic dust,

in a flattened dirty disk of elementary building blocks,

every compound ionized and pushed away,

like a giant enveloping velvet curtain to reveal a star,

My brethren are there, 

far beyond how far we humans have yet to reach,

but we've been there before,

We once knew the atoms,

of the composite structures destined to look upon us as Cosmic citizens,

mutual yet diverse

Across the Milky Way,

in a time so long ago,

we humans were but future events,

in a fiery nuclear furnace,

of blue and tinted hue,

I've seen myself before I was born,

A light pushing aside the crumbs,

ionizing a new planetary disk,

growing new worlds and thus wonder,

new species never dreamt before,

no matter the splendor of this new system,

it must die,

Snuffed out by the destiny imbued,

by the first photons emitted in the first few moments,

of infant stellar light,

A blackened charred core left behind,

I've seen myself after I die,

the tendrils of biological interaction,

chemical decomposition,

and physical dissipation,

an osmotic migration of what used to be,

permeates and coalesces into rocks and streams,

the essential dichotomy molecule of life,

of mine,

Will enter others, or flow into the oceans,

again my atoms will go to the stars,

and meet their long lost brethren again,

Across the empty void of space,

to more distant stars and worlds both in space and time,

No matter what we may think or believe,

we're all voyagers to the stars