Unnameable Spawn of Science

A little background on this one is deserved. On an online science/literary journal (if there can be such a monstrous thing) they had a challenge to write poems about quarks. Specifically, it said to take as your title one of the different subtypes of quarks: up, down, charm, strange, top, or bottom. They also mentioned that 'top' and 'bottom' had before been 'beauty' and 'truth' but nobody could keep the names straight and the two were constantly being confused even in academic publications.

Well, as I write untitled poems, I thought "Hey, why not use all of them? And in an ascending scale of complexity until complexity becomes confusion? But still have it real small and minimalist so it feels like quantums inhabiting vast galaxies of empty space at a microscopic level?" Of course, it became a slow joke about science, empiricism, and human ingenuity.

Well, I never submitted it to the journal, so I thought I'd put it here.

up.

facing into fiction

down.

supine in the mud-

nose in the truth

strange.

your bearings are slowly relinquished

in planeless space

teasing form out of void

charm.

you twirl epileptic

sufi of the fire

tracing you in rays of light

the sun absolves of darkness

top.

when were you alone before

in the context of man

the tweezers and engines of inquiry

the genie's bottle

exorcised the genie

bottom.

the pyramid has a base

the column has a root

studying roots & branches

the science of beginnings and ends

yields the discernment & the is or is-not/neither is nor isn't

negation of [beauty] and [truth]