Our Quantum Entanglement
PART ONE.
Black holes
can bend
a universe.
No amount of light
can escape a galaxy’s
human-like shift
toward darkness.
One minute
on the edge
of a black hole
is 700 years
on earth.
The pull of desolation
is too heavy,
the path ahead
has spun out of control,
the cosmic flow
becomes
a cataclysm
while light, sound,
and energy
get warped,
and every single
piece of matter
is torn apart.
PART TWO.
Does anyone find it
ironic
that a
website
will ask you
to prove you are
not a robot?
Does anyone know
what it’s like
to not feel
human?
There are days
when I don’t have
the energy
to check
the box,
because I’ve been
plugged in
and programmed
for sadness
so long
that anxiety attacks
and attaches itself
to my thoughts
like a computer virus.
It clings to,
corrupts,
and disrupts
the way I feel
about any
and everything
that I touch,
like these new
majestic wrinkles
around my eyes,
or the tiny
iPhone screen
I keep
tap
tap
tapping
to somehow prove
that I am not a robot.
To somehow prove
that I am human.
To somehow prove
that I matter.
PART THREE.
The sky never takes a bad picture
even though it is constantly
shifting the way it looks.
Its beauty somehow perfectly
moves through time, seasons, and
every single wind of change.
I hope that if you dream about
being the sky, it will not be
a nightmare. I hope that you will
not think of the stars on your
Black face as pimples, because
you are a force of light matter
simply shadowed by a mountain
of heavy. You are the sunflowers
still growing in the backyard
of a funeral home. You are its first
taste of cool rain after a
South Carolina summer. & if you
can’t imagine the sun telling you
to take another photo because it
wasn’t shining at the right angle,
I invite you to reflect on it and
remind yourself: The fact that it
shines at all matters. The fact that
it shines on you matters.
PART FOUR.
Sports allows men
the permission
they need to talk
to each other
with any kind
of emotional depth.
If fatherhood
doesn’t link them,
then a football will,
as hard stats
fall from our mouths
like notes
of a hard rock
guitar,
because music is also
one of the few ways
men will talk
to each other
with any kind
of emotional depth.
With loud,
American
bullhorn breaths,
as if debating
who the greatest
football player
of all time
is the only thing
that matters!
As if debating
who the greatest
guitar player
of all time
is the only thing
that matters!
PART FIVE.
Perhaps God
is in the notes
that echo
between us
when we
talk to each other.
Perhaps God
is the information
superhighway.
The code.
The scorekeeper.
Intimacy in
unison.
Our music
linked across
light years.
PART SIX.
It’s ironic:
All of space becomes
an endless boundary
when gravity’s pull
grabs the body of a planet
and forces it into a decaying
downward spiral –
spinning, reminiscing,
reflecting, and
holding on
to time
before it is lost forever.
When that happened to me,
the years of my life became quicksand:
slipping through the branches of my hands
because my fingers started looking
like limbs from an old pine tree
because I think it’s weird that
sunflowers look up at me for
wisdom,
because my voice suddenly deepened
into an almost earthly tone –
too cool to spit fire,
but not too ashamed
to gnaw on the ashes of my past.
I’m often too preoccupied
with changing the furniture
in my prison cell mind
to somehow get a better view of the world,
but I’m smart enough
to not take myself too seriously
because even after zooming in
on every little thing that matters,
there’s a part of me
that can imagine
this galaxy as a
single grain of sand
on an endless beach.
I can zoom out and think about
a black hole and its one-way
love affair with planets.
I am amazed at all of the ways
in which we choose to
connect to each other.
I have the hope that
on the other side of a black hole,
there is an alien world
that worships the same God,
& I can consider all the possibilities.
all of the the paradoxes of
knowing that everything that
I think may matter,
and everything
that I think is matter,
might not
matter at all.
