COMING TO GRIPS

STRING THEORY*

Your teeth break

on the body’s grief.

Pain unjoints you, strips

your bones and cracks your ribs.

Loneliness, with its ocean cold,

abandons

you to a distant plane.

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 into

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 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.