“don’t you know, I’m burning up inside!” says the man in the video

and the video soon slips my mind and so does the

piercing (forgettable) scream. Until, in the way I imagine

miracles must occur sometimes, he is my oldest companion

and I understand him so fully I could cry.

 

If my mind, too, was bound to animal flesh, it would be

out of breath. Panting in the thick of July and ugly.

And it’s not even July. It’s mid-April and beautiful.

But I know myself for artful separation. It’s a clever

 

Trick; how I can sit here in a perfectly regular lecture

and think myself into tragedy. How my eyes can

frost over like an oracle’s and transcend into a

Second Realm. Where my friends are not criminals.

Where my enemies are hatable and traced in

black ink. Where they are not one and the same thing.

Not at the same time. Where time is not so despotic

and I love myself. Now the tears threaten gently and

 

“the universe has certain symmetries,” says my physics teacher

trying to explain antimatter to me. Poor man;

my brain is about to implode, let alone absorb.

Am I a furnace, how come everything keeps heating up,

I learned heat is just tiny things moving quicker

(in this very class one year ago) without escape—

so all I can think about is don’t you know,

I’m burning up inside! I’m burning up inside!

 

Remember the blind woman in the movie typing

my world is still black black black black black

 

This morning, the fried rice was too greasy and

I couldn’t take more than three bites. Someday

the grease will be too much and I will not get out of bed.

I will refuse. I will leave something poignant for

my headstone; something about all the transient thoughts

I wish would’ve stayed, a voluntary haunting, a summoned hum of sorrow,

like the concentrated hotness of steam, just begging.

 

But they didn’t stay.

And maybe that is a good thing.

Maybe the things I wish for are not good.

The universe keeps certain things out of sight

but not out of mind.

 

“It’s gonna look a bit like a fuzzy coffee mug stain—”

he means the first-ever image of a black hole.

We are not supposed to be disappointed

in the least. But I am, by this unremarkable ring of radiation

some middle schooler could’ve photoshopped.

 

Listen: when you get close enough, though,

to a black hole I mean, there is a point where light bends

so much it is circular. And there, where worlds

meet and logic separates from itself, beyond my

Second Realm or even the Third or the Fourth,

if you looked right out in front of you,

you would see the back of your own head.