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Certainty (a poem for comfort)
When everything else
is running off-kilter around me
they're always there, cold friends.
Some of them I know by name
electron, proton, positron,
quarks up and down and strange
and charmed. I thought
I was living a charmed life,
but it was only strange.
The uncertainty of particles is better
than the uncertainty of living, or at least
it's less scary. I'm scared all the time now
trying not to collapse into myself.
Those cosmic rays are still at it
going right through me as if I were a ghost
and maybe the way you need
that sneaky square root of minus one
to solve the universe (or even build a TV set)
holds out hope of immortality: if i
is real, and necessary,
maybe so am I?
In the closest thing to total vacuum
particles come and go, sometimes tending to exist.
Sometimes
I tend to hope, but too often
hope flickers back into the void, leaving
the closest thing to total despair.
The net energy of the entire universe
may be zero: each star cancelled out by its own death
space imploding back toward its beginning. That's
the sound of one hand clapping.
Yet the unused six dimensions
are curled up smaller than atoms.
Everything that is might be the vibration
of threads too small to see,
musical notes of superstrings.
Take two particles from the same source
separate them, any distance will do,
and what you do to one of them
will instantly affect the other. (As I
am affected by you.)
At this smallest level the usual rules don't apply
time is just a field to roam in
ghosts occur
miracles are the order of the day.
This is where the solid daily world comes from,
all these mysteries and miracles
built upon each other until they seem ordinary.
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