Half Life

You have always and only ever been in the middle of things
awake in the midst of a body straddling life
in medias res, ab ovo.
You negotiate flow
between north and southbound:
the medium and the median.
You are the trace of an argument
between the circle and the line:
cartesian coordinates desirous of
the planar, the corporeal, the rhizomatic.
Some arguments end in a peace accord.
All arguments end.
You are an index of traversal
marking that which keeps you coming back to
that which you keep coming back to.
Years and yards
mindful of momentum,
either embrace or encroach
on this
your home.
You’re a star,
a situated self
half out of hydrogen.
(The glass is not half full.)
Spent energy, however, persists,
and insists on being remade
into movement or heat
or just old light,
awaiting a retinal soft landing
on alien eyes
another four and half billion years
or so
from now.
You are an exponentially decaying quantity,
which sounds like an insult,
until you read the fine print
in which it is said
that you possess
an immeasurable
half life.

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