relativity – poems 2 die for

RED SHIFT

blue shift
red shift

we are moving towards
now moving away
from each other

I can see you
from my point of vantage
our
realities just
a little off, between
us just
a smidgen of difference

out of synch
as we are
I can still catch a
glimpse of a white hot streak
of a shock of silver hair
that will
outlive the ages

shocked by the realization
that you are about
to midwife yourself
into the birth
of a brilliant idea

leaving, if space and time
were a train with carriages
and track
and station

your precursors who got it
so wrong
stuck on the platform
eclipsed
forever

but
   you can help them, assure
them, mitigate the error,
when you
       stick them on
your torch beam, jujitsu their
brains into
fully understanding
     my forever is
not your
forever
     no forever is
the same

if forever were a river
once, twice,
try
to get your
head around it, you
can never
step into it

step
out of it

you are in that river, are
that river

time for
you to realize how these
rivers (so
many rivers)
run
so fluently

blue shift
red shift

you came I came
we saw we
(almost)
intersected

and as
things do, gaining, losing
connected, disconnecting

we watch
waves lengthen
were tears
departure, arrival
laughter

inside out by now
you know
the spectrum

bitter irony
in the colours warming
fatal
shift in
the palette

simply, it must be
said,

things disappear

PROXIMA

I am about to start crawling
to the nearest star

will be
a trillion years older than you
thanks to
time dilation

returning to a world
a Universe that no longer exists

out there in the whatever
orbiting forever
having
evolved to survive
the lack of everything

now
there is no human warmth
no human cold.

CURVED (TOGETHER)

chaos dawned
fractals like schools
of forever spawning fish
did
abound

and with them
as summoned

Aphrodite
that absolute beauty
born of monstrosity

was born
(if birth is a word that at all
befits
her genesis)

time stretching
space stretching stretching together as
interlaced reality

everything stretching to
accomodate
run
with that pattern

and with Aphrodite
the universe really curved. with but
a single goddess glance
stone, rock,
sand
came alive, sure antithesis
to Medusa

she and me riding that wave tracking
that curved ball

roving
through left field (the grass
grown too tall for baseball)

moving all the
time
desire and its object
gold and
base metal chasing each other
ad infinitum Achilles
and tortoise
mortal and
divine
sacred and profane moving together
forever (unless
I get my relativity wrong)

EASY

easy to draw
analogies, parallels
but also hard

here I am in the realm
of the luscious isosceles and
prudent equilateral

at right angles
to you
dealing with gravity
and the curvature
of space-time

sliding along the hypotenuse
reading your front page,
back page

headlines
and all about you corporeally
the behoves to
be on page three

my life
spread like toast
with marmalade
like centrefold
like
money shot

and time is money
need to drag out
time together
collapsing
the distance
between us

like we together exact
same hyper-sensual moment

hitting that
Venus Mars conjunction
lightspeed

PIE

ONCE AND FOR ALL

was talking to you
but then
you evaporated
tried to speak
more loudly
but it was
to no avail

but what is space
anyway
but a construct
of gravity
when we are hurtling
in our group
of forty galaxies
towards some
great attractor
billions of light years
away in space

hundreds of kilometres
a second
how do you even
start to
wrap your mind around it
but for relativity
such a speed would
be impossible
to comprehend

and
the fabric of the Universe
expanding above light speed
about to strip
the stars
away from us
and all else

this and more
I get from skimming through
all those YouTube channels
finding an
alternate politics
to chart how deeply runs
the establishment lie

pictures of the war, of
slavering holy savagery

mind-bending theories
of our origin, identity
and destination

disasters to
end the planet
once and for all

I was going off and this
when they decided it
was right
and proper

a political necessity
to turn you
and your world
to ash and rubble

an insane vision
that somehow,
for my sins, I do not share

JOZIE

JOZIE

hours later
my eyes
still glued to the road

except
this is all afterburn
the road is inside my head

oh Jozie
flashiest of cities
will you
flash for me
as I flash by

naked on the hotel bed
I feel gravity, taste relativity

conjure you up
from every mixed memory
(and
much mixed metaphor —
woefully so)

the mirror is like
the bottom of the sea

so far inland but
I can hear the waves in
False Bay roaring

but is this dream
trajectory
or am I now, at last,
speeding homeward?

so many souls leaving
not staying, refusing
to stick around in case
of a grand finale

jaw-dropping twist
in the ending

like when you
first confessed your nakedness

RIDE

RIDE a thought experiment: imagine we are in a parallel universe where there are no thought experiments no leap of faith analogies where Einstein was a plodder without the imagination to extend parameters, push envelopes, explode paradox and we all stuck in the old Isaac Newton prison of cast-iron space and time yes this is my little poetic thought experiment happy you joined me as here we hit light speed everything now counter-intuitive about this ride

AS OF COURSE YOU WERE

AS OF COURSE YOU WERE

golden child soared
got hit

fell, crash-landed
amongst the other scrapyard relics

could have
taken a lifetime; could
have just taken seconds

relativity is critical
to the speed at which others age

indeed, retrospectively,
hurtling down the straight,
throwing yourself
into bends
accelerating out of corners

chewing up
the tarmac

all seems so slow, so laboured,
so back in model T, so
(to back up
a bit
reverse to the point of
our eating the road metaphor)

like you were nibbling your way
through a five course dinner

making a meal
of your life, as
of course you were

golden child soared
suffered much flak damage

the body

can only take so much panelbeating
and not a scratch more