I wish I were a quark,
strange and charming
colors far hidden
from your eyes.
Excitation of fields,
pebbles on a pond,
dreams echoing
interchanging
with subatomic lore
and quantum love.
I wish I were a quark,
so I would not have
to watch
my quantized heart
break again.
To not be chosen
once more, as darkness
pretends to care,
in the twilight of
my mourning,
I wonder what ghosts will
be there to force,
my eightfold way?
I wish I were a quark,
to take my strange mind to singularities to never be alone. For even a neutron has…
Is sorrow just mine,
or is it shared
like wind over a prairie
or a child’s smile
without care or worry?
And I wonder,
do you feel what I hide
I wonder,
do you know,
what I weep about
in the cold of a night?
Is sorrow light strewn
across space and time
given to a billion year
journey, without a friend
to share its mighty days
of bewildering obscurities,
Across the seas of danger
or valley’s to interchange her.
And yet here I stay
trembling,
in the distance
warmed only,
by a fool's hope. O! such
a beautiful thing.
…
I stand below a blinding light
and strip bare my soul
naked but never terrified.
I don’t fear my end anymore
only losing you again.
What lies behind,
and comes after the metamorphosis
in the way of princes and thieves.
Who I was and could have been
to whom I am longer,
betrothed to pretend,
that I am nothing but an echo
with a last name almost faded out
a thousand generations
in my eyes and skin,
woven into my DNA,
is the curse of a family,
yet made.
A thousand deaths, and here I take a single breath Trembling…
I skip a rock across the pond,
waves rippling as a smile
weaves athwart those sleepy clouds
cawing crows wonderment
as the songs of ornitho-love fill
all our days with plentitude.
Remembering days are gone,
the key placed in my hand,
tears that would not fertilize
our withered gardens,
speak only of tragedy
as she walked into the unknown
leaving earth to give one
last baryogenesis of a hope
into the silent night
and lonely highway
of a grieving sickle moon.
I know I will never be the same looking down into that painted face cedarwood casket, holding the remains…
There’s a man that comes to the pub
every night looking for a woman named
Annaliese.
He drinks bottom shelf
whiskey —
knowing solemnly
A liver fails no matter
a poison’s distance
from the ground to the sky.
His words but relative drunkards philosophy
echoing wooden walled insomniacs
discrepancies.
lies wrapped in tall-tales
and ignoble plights.
His words,
scattered, confused soliloquies
moths in daylight,
looking for somewhere,
or anywhere
to land.
Is he waiting for the Iceman to cometh? for a savior to burst through the night and read his last rites? Maybe he’s waiting for the apocalypse to strip…
I wonder if they know this place needn’t be so mad that these human inventions are but arbitrary rules that they murder their children for. They could have, instead, laughed, in the faces of empty suited reapers And said, “my child will not die For your eternal war.” No matter the television the game show the cell phone or iPad — no matter the transistor Automobile or CRISPR At the end of the day — It is by tribalism, And who has the biggest bone, that bury us all. A grave dug ten thousand years ago. For no matter race…
Do these wounds ever heal,
or will I carry them around
like a warrior’s scars?
Stories to tell our children
beneath a darkened twilight
Do the voices ever cease?
Will I never truly sleep?
Dying slowly of
the perfectionist disease,
the stress and pressure
a diamond in an anvil
squeezing the life out
a piece at a time
a deadline that screams
void of meaning or rhyme.
Am I the villain or hero
of this ghastly crime
called the “untitled” or “unwritten.”
For I am the unsaid
traveler of abandoned
apocalyptic streets
of the absurd
Searching for civility
for peace.
…
There’s an old dog
that howls through the night
ears hanging low, slumped
in fading lamplight.
Without hope or tomorrow
back legs tucked
under a belly filled
with tumors
the closest friends he has —
he’s even named each one.
That old dog doesn’t sleep
nightmares of rabbits
getting away,
haunt his unending days.
That old dog does howl
at a cold moon
above a low-hanging ceiling
that never barks back
at a creaky floorboard
which has taken his form,
and become his final bed.
And he knows love those puppy dog days when fireflies danced across a cornfield to…
The world has a heartbeat
it’s what keeps us tethered
to its dimensional temporality.
That energy keeps us
from flying off
into the pits of
meaningless anguish
immoral modalities,
and it never stops fluctuating,
or calling out to you.
To hear it
to feel it as a lover
to moan outwards
as pleasure succumbs to reason
starlike causality flows
timid at first
you must stand among it
in absolute unbecoming
and allow it to move you
that scientific wonderment
and awe-inspiring fever
let it palpitate
in Promethean fortitude.
You must listen Without a past or present Without a future beckoning…
Bullfrogs croak an ancient romance. Cardinals fill a blue sky with a vermillion lightening, dead tree limbs moan, reaching upwards through cloudy domes rippling sensually through weed-coated catacombs. In the quiet solitude of a prairie the whole universe is revealed to poets of broken hearts to philosophers of silent voices to speak it riddles, upon the grassy seas listening, as the meadowlarks plead As kingfisher eat. The world passing in absurd beliefs altocumulus despair forms without permanence life without love, cosmic candles without vigils burn wondering what it was all for to force nature into its littler corner did we…
Quantum physicist, science writer, explorer of the mind and philosophy, fiction writer, poetry, and creator of worlds. Find me on Twitter @bradleynordell