the second star in orion's belt has gone out, but the light from it is still travelling towards us, tonight we look up in surprise, it's gone out
��������� �����love as quantification;a series of numbers, hand-in-hand with one another and marching around the chalkboard in determined formation, stacking atop one another, mathematical copulations, fractions breaking down to be more than (one number takes a dive off the long division divingboard) what is left over, the remainder of (one heart plus one heart) is me and you, minus part of each other
they tell us that one + one = 2. but then they say that the act of love is one + one = one, and so i wonder if it is less addition (piling atop one another) than it is multiplication, multiplying one of the same by one of the same to make one of the same, an endless reflection of reflections, (seeing yourself in someone else, and multiplying within their eyes before you even enter within them), as if you simply are seeking to propagate your own tenuous identity further into the world.
one plus one and i am what is left over, as if suddenly the math is inverted when TRUELOVE enters the picture like a rogue binominal, multiplication turns into division 1 / 1 = 1, still, but this time it breaks down, there is no you&I there is you, and only you, there is assimilation.
i spit love like a quasar spits gamma rays, a galactic beacon of distress, a lighthouse with the Cassandra syndrome, it always arrives one day too late, no-one believes it (so many ships have crashed on the jagged rocks this way) and if there were a lighthouse in the everglades it'd be sunken into the mire by now, only a feeble lantern-top sticking out, emitting pale flashes like a giant firefly struggling in a morass of shit.
lightyears away, proxima centauri and alpha centauri discover one another and go supernova; speeding through red drawf yellow dwarf brown dwarf, a pitted puckering core, and then a shuddering before they consume one another there is ultimate consequence, division & multiplication all in one. their detritus lingers like your hair in the bathtub drain, scattered and thin. asteroids quiver as they pass by. i am staring at my shoes as you pass by. the sidewalk looks particularly nice today. grass between the cracks. an old cigarette butt stamped out by a sneaker. a twisted metal shopping cart lounging smugly, like a work of contemporary art, across the way. a car drives listlessly by. i am becoming accustomed to your backside, and how your muscles work underneath the layer of skin that covers you like a sheet would cover a beautiful statue. i am longing to see it and know it's not meant for me, ever. i will be content to imagine it.
the sky is blue today, i write in a letter, then scribble it out. this is the quantification of love, i write, then scribble it out. supernovas curl in my bed, i write, like dustbunnies. i roll one like a marble over the curves of your body and can almost hear its cosmic giggle. you hold up well with galactic disasters - they don't bother your worldview. "someday," i tell you, "two black holes are going to collide and the universe might end."
"that's nice," you tell me, and i'm feeling so empowered by your casual dismissal of the planned apocalypse.
"we'll all vanish in a puff of inverted energy," i say, like i know. my fingers are yellow-paging themselves up your left breast. you swat one away.
"stop that, it tickles." and i wonder if it will tickle when the sun goes brown. if like in the chewinggum commercials we'll all be able to breathe icyclouded breath and smile frostily at passersby.
you're reading some book or magazine. cosmo, i assume. outside, a bird stops singing, and next door, someone pumps up the volume on their punk rock. you don't smile. you've forgotten how, a long time ago.
i slide away. eventually the moon will rise. the clouds will scatter like dark cotton on the sky, like a stuffed animal ripped apart, and the sound the moon makes on contact with the azimuth of its arc will be like the sound a glass eye makes on contact with the floor;