Your teeth break
on the body’s grief.
Pain unjoints you, strips
your bones and cracks your ribs.
Loneliness, with its ocean cold,
rides your tides.
You have learned how to suffer.
Your mind, once a pearled matrix,
splits open.
Your ruptured thoughts nova,
collapse like a dark star.
What remains compresses you into
a shrunken space.
Dreams do not protect you.
You have learned how to suffer.
You’d like to ride away on light
from the Big Bang
but gravity bends you back.
No longer a particle floating
on wavelengths,
you are a twist of string,
a filament.
Devolved, a one-dimensional
member
of pain’s empire,
you’ve become a theory.
*A unified theory of the universe wherein the smallest particles of nature
are thought to be theoretical filaments called strings.