Calcium

 Calcium

 

Bone-cleaver cleaved to bone. 

Not a solid thing, like steel or a rock. 

Full of voids, the way a skeleton is 

capacity for what is to come, 

and what was. The passing of a person 

who was built in. 

In this way it resembles cartilage—

serpent eating its tail, one half, 

osteoblast, melting the other, 

cells bubbling from this endeavor. 

Though what survives is just to my skeleton. 

The rest of me, this mass—

in this way, it resembles the ocean. 

Voids everywhere, as if the flood gates were 

open, and my body poured out of the others, 

spat out, at the same time, that lake of ocean: 

the membrane of my body, 

and a surge of nameless—unnameable—fluids, 

rushing and surging, toward my half-drained ribs, 

the way I saw the sparkling eye on the skull. 

It was the same within my body. 

It all cascaded into one black flood of void, 

one pulse of chaos, 

the way the fall of butterfly wings is an endless 

unfolding of diamonds; and there, 

in the immense darkness, 

light begins to emerge, 

some dimming, some brightening, 

until at last glaring into the light, 

the white hole into which you will fall, 

when you get lost. The finale. 

The music slowed as I lost consciousness. 

That wasn’t fair. 

The story had finished before it was over. 

I’m still fumbling around in the back 

of the netherworld, 

like a lost snake coiling in the void.