Physics

March 24, 2023

RADIOACTIVE

I cannot say for certain which day
I became the familial isotope,
but I know my parents began
accreting neutrons not long
after their marriage, bound
to their mutual core, unbound
from me, adopted into the family,
and I then became the isotope
of the family but remote,
easily enough forgotten,
when I was not present.
That is, I suppose, one possible
fate for an isotope, it’s familial
half-life up and then forgotten.

But perhaps it was just
that I was the family’s
Schrödinger’s cat, finally put
in a box into which
no one chose to look.

March 8, 2023

THE OLD ROCKER

I reached the point in life
where I know the Byrds were right,
I was so much older then,
I’m younger than that now, and
for good measure Jethro Tull knew
I was too old to rock ‘n’ roll
but far too young to die.
And yet I am still inchoate,
a product of the Big Bang, stellar
dust accreted temporarily.
And the Webb Space Telescope
has given me the next best thing
to immortality, for when the time comes
and I hope it isn’t all that soon,
when my body is cremated, that
momentary heat signature will
be seen in some planet in a galaxy
at the edge of the universe
some 13 billion years later,
long after my ashes will have
returned to the cosmos,
from where I came.

March 1, 2023

TIDY

It was simple by definition
a neat orderly universe, but then
a Big Bang and all of the planning
went out in a monumental flash.

He could easily have corrected it
a simple thought would have
done the trick, but He made the rules
so He had no choice but to abide by them.

It was truly a godly mess, He
would be the first to admit it
had there been anyone to whom
He might admit it, but that lot

on Olympus were a poor joke,
and had long since ceased
to serve any purpose at all
save taking up library space.

So things were banged about, things
blew up spectacularly, things
disappeared entirely, and he
was left to practice meditation.

February 24, 2023

SETI

Perhaps we spend too much
time wondering if there are
aliens of the ET sort among us.

Let’s face it, if they are
advanced enough to get here,
they ought to be able to fit in
without standing out, so
sorry Hollywood, it may make
for an exciting movie but
it just isn’t all that likely.

And before you remind me
of UFO sightings, just because
you see a bus stop in the dark
of night, you can’t be certain
anyone got off or on, can you?

December 23, 2022

PAUSE

The world ended yesterday
just as predicted, and then
restarted, and nothing at all
seemed to change yet
everything was slightly
different, a little askew.

I noticed it, although no one
around me detected it,
went about their day
as though nothing happened.

The preachers didn’t foresee
it coming, hadn’t predicted it,
glad when the restart did not
signal the end of days, for they
were no longer certain where
they would spend eternity.

I had no such expectations
and the moment duly noted, I
went about my day normally

December 17, 2022

BENT ARROW

He would never understand how time developed a flexibility that defied the laws of physics. An hour, a minute, a second, they were all standard measures. Each the same as every other. Yet lately they had changed, flexed. For the most part they had gotten shorter, shrunken. He knew that wasn’t possible until he remembered Einstein’s famous quote.* But perhaps that Einsteinian law applied only to those of a certain growing age, like his.

*Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute.

August 20, 2022

THE CAT

Pause and consider, if only
for a moment, this question,
which you need not answer
as you will be right and
you will be wrong regardless
of what you say in response.

What if we are the cat in
some Godly thought experiment
and our degradation of the planet
is the bit of radioactive material,
of which we have in profusion.

Are we alive, or are we dead,
or both, until God again
checks in on us, so we must
hope He is too busy creating
other worlds and correcting
the errors he made in this one.

August 7, 2022

CELESTIAL RHYTHM

It was a certain rhythm that he loved,
one he felt it in total silence, yet it faded
in the presence of sound, a doumbek
of the soul he would describe it.

He remembered how it was before
their one god rendered him and his kind
mere mythological creatures fit only
for poetry and dusty library shelves.

He would have his revenge some day,
would condemn their God to a corner
of the heavens, an eternity to reconsider
the rashness of his narcissism, but

in the meanwhile he would continue
to rest in the heart of this constellation
hoping to go unnoticed, happy just
to listen to the rhythm of the universe.

July 29, 2022

HE WHO LAUGHS LAST

The moon was kind enough
to linger this morning,
knowing that I wanted
a photograph, and that
I needed sufficient ambient
light to allow me
to fully capture her visage.
Sometimes she rises early
and shows her face
before the sun retreats.
I suppose it may just
be vanity on the moon’s part,
showing off for her brighter
sibling, certain I will never
pause to photograph Sol.
Tomorrow it will be cloudy
most likely, and on that day
the sun will get the last laugh.