Black Hole

We are the broken chain of DNA

in a double helix extending

from one end of the universe to the other.

What once was whole now dangles

between planets like a cracked tooth

long ready to be pulled. 

 

(“We don’t want to be corrected,”

we cry; “we want to be erased.”)

 

Why is it that we scream so loudly,

with only the moon to echo our cries?

We don’t belong here, tethered by gravity

to a bruised Earth. We are monsters here;

we are the monsters we hear in the dark.

 

Take a handful of soil and toss it to space;

will that island of life one day house us all?

Or does the soil belong here, with us?

 

This screaming, this tethered existence –

maybe this is simply the life of a seed

waiting to sprout. Alone in the soil,

made for reaching arms and branches.

 

I’ve never been in love. I am a seed

that doesn’t believe in sprouting.

Maybe I am the broken chain of DNA;

maybe, while the world crisscrosses the universe in a grid,

I alone am dangling from the south pole,

aimless, and unfettered, and unconnected.

 

Maybe I am a mystery,

but all mysteries wish to be found out –

if only that didn’t mean ceasing to be.

Lake Junaluska

Clocks in the stems of leaves; gears whirring to push grass from the dirt. Blue mist haunts above the soil, tasting of mercury, like blood rather than water. Run your hands beneath streams of coolant coursing through the mountains from the heart of the mechanism; where we performed triple bypass on the earth’s core. Her breathing is in rasps; it shakes with the smoke of her artificial lungs. And we, with bloodied fists, beat the soil, watering the grass with tears of disillusioned abandonment, and fall asleep in the dust, alive only in the arms of another.

In January, when the comforter is dirty and sits in the laundry room, two bodies shiver close together in every household. There are choked sobs to be heard, as outside, trees recede from the mountains like the aging man the planet is and sirens pulse over plains of concrete chasing men and women whose faces glow with lust – worthy only of horror stories told a hundred years ago. Again, on the pillow. Regrets of having brought an untainted child into a suffocating world. In the corner a seed dies beneath the dry soil, but a seedling waits for day to sprout.