By: Ben Wright

Shadow Person

I’m still not sure of my favorite season, nor if I’m a morning person or an evening person, but I do love dawn and dusk – those times when the sun is hiding behind the hills and all the shadows are living on their keepers.

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Breathing Underwater

As far as I know, this is joy – letting the ocean pull you into weightlessness, carrying your breath on the tide. Exhale, the world is waving blue and shimmering gold. You sink into the seaweed as you are made light.

And after a while, your fingers and lips prune; you start sprouting barnacles while birds and fish pick at your flesh until

you are nothing but a skeleton being ground into sand by the current and washed upon the shores of the Earth.

Surface.

Inhale.

The shimmering world is vanished.

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Instant

Space – yes, that star-sprinkled void – smells like cheap cigarettes, and the Milky Way is a pinball game in the backroom of a bombed-out-tenement-turned-nightery. To electric tunes, a wizard balances a pilsner glass on our solar system while he ricochets mini, glow-in-the-dark stars off the outer rims of the machine until gravity inexorably drags them into the black hole conducting all the syzygies of this galaxy as if they were an orchestra whose instruments had caught fire from fiddling too fast.

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(n^2-n)/2

“See the cat? See the cradle?” – Kurt Vonnegut

Every speck of matter
in this universe
attracts every other.

Take n to be the number of
Heavenly Bodies
up in space.

Multiply n by itself.
Subtract n from the result.
Now, take half.

That’s the number of places
in the so-called infinite vacuum
where the atmospheres
of two Bodies
are rubbing on one another,
generating heat.

Now, take n to be the number of human
beings
on this planet, Earth.

(n^2-n)/2…

That’s the number of invisible strings
drawing us all closer.