Arts & CultureLIFESTYLE

Poetry Corner: GRAVITY’S END

Introducing a new series of poems by Julian Matthews. Julian is a writer and Pushcart-nominated poet published in The American Journal of Poetry, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Borderless Journal, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Dream Catcher Magazine,  Live Encounters Magazine, Lothlorien Poetry Journal and The New Verse News, among others. He is a mixed-race minority from Malaysia and lived in Ipoh for seven years. Currently based in Petaling Jaya, he is a media trainer and consultant for senior management of multinationals on Effective Media Relations, Social Media and Crisis Communications. He was formerly a journalist with The Star and Nikkei Business Publications Inc

Link: https://linktr.ee/julianmatthews

By Julian Matthews

Grief isn’t a particle.
I can’t take it apart and examine its insides.
I can’t send it through the Large Hadron Collider
and break it down to a boson.
But grief is a crude reductionist.
It comes in waves, finds my insides,
breaks me down – and everything falls apart.

They say distance lessens the ache, time heals,
but spacetime is curved, it draws us back
to each other, our atoms intertwined,
entangled on the quantum scale.
Grief is a cruel arbitrator between the grave
and the gravitas of this suffering.

They say energy cannot be created
or destroyed, it can only be transformed.
Don’t I know it! I feel you here, even now.
For what is separation if not an unbinding,
a force impinging another’s reluctance
to let go, pulling away only to return
again and again, like a persistent memory.

Maybe I need a seance not science
to connect the dots, reconnect what’s lost.
A woo-woo intervention, or a psychedelic shortcut.
Is there a loophole in the poles now apart?
Show me a wormhole out of this black hole.
Where do I rip the fabric of parallel universes
to emerge on the other side? The tear
that will end the tears, when the relativity
of this reality will make sense, when both sides
of this misaligned equation will finally resolve
and add up to something that doesn’t feel like
a subtraction, a lessening, a half-life.

If there is a rainbow at gravity’s end,
strap me to that accelerator
and hit send.

First published in Loch Raven Review, Maryland, USA.

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