Low Earth Orbits of a Forlorn Physicist

A sestina about obsession & change

I walk through honeydew sunsets — thoughts refracted in the philosophy of stars, as I bite darkness with morose hope meander into unobserved nothingness, leaving you what’s left of me, ashes of my words, cells of my heart.

For what it’s worth, given the remains of an empty heart, I am but sentimentality clinging to past sunsets. To the edges never defined, the places of me those paradoxes never sought, inside newborn stars still thinking of you. The love we called nothingness As that green sundress swirled in a lustful tightrope.

When we walked along Holmes Lake filled with hope and you told me that entangling our hearts would be the thing to take away the nothingness. But then came the thunderstorms dissipating sunsets echoes of night, backfiring cars, flickering stars; old trash cans banging upon metal. Leaving me

alone as the tom cat howls. Waiting drains me like the time before we first met without hope. Those emerald eyes like ancient stars showed me a future where I could trust my heart A future unwoven, set in water, lost in sunsets Not in stone, where form destroys nothingness.

It went wrong, calculating pages of nothing Imaginary probabilities — traded fate for belief. Derived unreal equations and called it our sunset. And now here I am, the luster gone of my hope Equations without fire, fire without hearth, searcher lost in the ruins of a collapsing star.

Waiting for the signal from a castaway pulsar The ash of your final letter feels like nothingness Wondering what happens when you see my heart Its foundation went, an orbit unstable inside me making its way to the final place of infinite hope — in the heavy heart of an alien sunset.

solutions never discovered in a collapsed star Instead, fused our elements, forgot bitter nothingness, and said goodbye a thousand times but left our sins in false hope.

© Bradley J Nordell 2023

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