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.

Waking to an Open Window

O! For the wide, white nights of the far North!

The warm breath of earth tinged with flowers

falling from the leaves that ousted them.

The ground white with Bradford’s pear blossoms,

reflecting nights that never truly dim to darkness.

 

And we lay on a carpet of clovers,

violet with the vibrancies of new life.

 

What is this world set on stone and soil,

fringed by cloud and outer oceans of vacuum?

If I were to feel the entire heartbeat

of the universe at large, would I

 

be less awed by that white heartbeat of yours,

beating violet in the clover beside me?