Science

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 14, 2023

NEWOLOGY

I have decided it is now time
and I am establishing a new
field of study that blends
mathematics and political science,
which I have named idiometry.

Simply put, idiometry allows one
to measure just how close one can
take the statements or promises
if any politician and square
them with the actual facts.

Then you repeat this for all
of the statements of that politician
and you inevitably find the square
unattainable, there simply are
no perfect squares yet achieved
in idiometry, for no politician
ever seen on a public stage
hews perfectly to facts, always
veering off into self interest
or blatant ideology, so perhaps
idiometry isn’t worth it, telling us
what we already knew full well.

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 7, 2023

PHONE HOME?

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

Let’a 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?

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?

January 29, 2023

IN A HIDDEN CORNER

As stars go, of course
it is rather nondescript,
small, middle aged
stuck in a distant corner
of a not all that
impressive galaxy.

Yet each morning
it sweeps the sky
storing all of its kin,
even the biggest
and brightest, into
its own celestial closet
where they will
remain locked away
until it decides
it needs a rest
and lets them return
to once again
paint the sky.

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.