i have spent my entire life
waiting for morning to fall
so as not to lie awake
in your absence.

we are quantum crashes, you and i
a million millionths of a second where
we collide and nothing exists
perhaps it is this repetition (and constant renewal)
that has worn us both down.

today i learned that this chaos of you and i
has a quiet and tidy written expression
(natural with ungainly applications).
i tried to remove you from the formula
and found that the equation does not solve.

when you loved me rugged and raw and kind
you holding every fragment of my matter
as though you had known it since your time began
the solution began to come into view;
but can you love me antimatter
blinking fragments always present and blind
on a path to perpetually crash and merge
if i can draw for you every bit of me
invisibly waiting for you to move or breathe?

i could spend your afternoon pointing at trees
and showing you how x times y equals
something completely different than its reverse
but if you would still be afraid to lay your hands on me
for fear that you would find that i was never truly here
then there is nothing left for me to do
except wait for the crashing and renewing
to remind your every atom of its shadow.

magellan's bitch.

i keep playing things over again
as though, from the right angle,
i could circumvent this tragedy
as easily as you circumnavigated
every word i ever had to offer.

the best of days for atonement.

for penance i would offer you
a million nights of humble servitude
my hand at your side, waiting.

i would hang myself openly for the theft
of your heart but moreso the lack of care
with which i kept it.

candles lit, remember this:
i would make you a new covenant
should you find the old one too broken to bear.

skyrockets in flight; afternoon delight

we are naked atoms running for cover
out of the glaring heat of 40x magnification
showing all our flaws, all our truths
triple oxygen keeping me stuck to you
warning that we are volatile, explosive
pure potential energy violating every law
as sitting we wait, in stasis

we are a spacetime curve collision
time's cessation halting churning nothingness
grasping distant bits of far off universes
setting them to congeal in this new amalgam of us
and light, begging to be free of us
bends and turns upon itself without end
and our every axis converging to form
a single point
where
everything
stops
and we begin.

is the thought of a unicorn a real thought?

einstein never stopped breathing because he couldn't reconcile his atoms.
i've never been so good at daily life, which is to say that i'm not a good enough taoist,
that i'm not very zen, that i can't just embrace the chaos and in doing so say 'there is no chaos.'
in a grander scheme, sure, i get it. life is a series of collisions and so on and take a deep breath.
and then move on.

but i can't accept chaos on an atomic level, the idea that the second we stop looking, there are no rules. i can play a game of chaos chess with the best of them, and sweeping my piece onto the floor or knocking over my cup of coffee declare that "I--" because what i've done isn't important, and when there are no rules, it's not about winning or losing, or even being or ceasing to exist, it just is, or isn't, depending on how you look at it or don't. but then i know that it's a game, and thereby just an illusion, and i can accept the unreality of an illusion but not the unreality of the stuff of which the illusion is made, the matter of the illusion. because on a fundamental level, things fall apart.

say that you were making a movie. of your life, your family, your job, or anything about which you would possibly alter your version of the truth and fictionalize. well, when you watch the film, you know that it's not real, and that it's just a depiction of the real thing. that's easy to accept-- you can see your own part in making the illusion. but then suppose that you find out that the digital camcorder, the firewire cable, the computer you used to edit, the hands you used to hold the camera, the eye you used to focus, the sound waves that put everyone on their marks-- none of it is real. suppose you're sitting one day happily watching your fictional video and then everything that had a part in making the film just disintegrated. poof. crumbled into nothingness right before your eyes. well, then the question arises-- how the hell did you make the video in the first place, if there was never a camera, never hands, never sound waves?