live in dreams.

Well, I’ve changed the course of music five or six times. What have you done except fuck the president?

Do not fall in love With people like me. people like me will love you so hard that you turn into stone into a statue where people come to marvel at how long it must have taken to carve that faraway look into your eyes Do not fall in love with people like me we will take you to museums and parks and monuments and kiss you in every beautiful place so that you can never go back to them without tasting us like blood in your mouth Do not come any closer. people like me are bombs when our time is up we will splatter loss all over your walls in angry colors that make you wish your doorway never learned our name do not fall in love with people like me. with the lonely ones we will forget our own names if it means learning yours we will make you think hurricanes are gentle that pain is a gift you will get lost in the desperation in the longing for something that is always reaching but never able to hold do not fall in love with people like me. we will destroy your apartment we will throw apologies at you that shatter on the floor and cut your feet we will never learn how to be soft we will leave. we always do.

You want a physicist to speak at your funeral. You want the physicist to talk to your grieving family about the conservation of energy, so they will understand that your energy has not died. You want the physicist to remind your sobbing mother about the first law of thermodynamics; that no energy gets created in the universe, and none is destroyed. You want your mother to know that all your energy, every vibration, every Btu of heat, every wave of every particle that was her beloved child remains with her in this world. You want the physicist to tell your weeping father that amid energies of the cosmos, you gave as good as you got. And at one point you’d hope that the physicist would step down from the pulpit and walk to your brokenhearted spouse there in the pew and tell him that all the photons that ever bounced off your face, all the particles whose paths were interrupted by your smile, by the touch of your hair, hundreds of trillions of particles, have raced off like children, their ways forever changed by you. And as your widow rocks in the arms of a loving family, may the physicist let her know that all the photons that bounced from you were gathered in the particle detectors that are her eyes, that those photons created within her constellations of electromagnetically charged neurons whose energy will go on forever. And the physicist will remind the congregation of how much of all our energy is given off as heat. There may be a few fanning themselves with their programs as he says it. And he will tell them that the warmth that flowed through you in life is still here, still part of all that we are, even as we who mourn continue the heat of our own lives. And you’ll want the physicist to explain to those who loved you that they need not have faith; indeed, they should not have faith. Let them know that they can measure, that scientists have measured precisely the conservation of energy and found it accurate, verifiable and consistent across space and time. You can hope your family will examine the evidence and satisfy themselves that the science is sound and that they’ll be comforted to know your energy’s still around. According to the law of the conservation of energy, not a bit of you is gone; you’re just less orderly. Amen.