Daily(ish) poem → 00303 ◊ Dark Matter Ode ◊ Rowan Ricardo Phillips
Dark Matter Ode
You’ll say you can’t remember, you were too
Young—the idea wasn’t yours. Or, maybe
You’ll feel the need to feel misunderstood
And say, You don’t understand, You don’t
Understand, You don’t. But I was there
When the sky closed. I know that brief darkness
Feels good. That God works on no sleep as certain
As Br’er Sleep reclining in your lampshade,
Sweet Br’er Sleep who never knows sleep. His song
Swells in my wrists as they hang on your crib.
Leaning in, inspecting you like a crook,
I am the poet in his pillory.
I see you as free. I sing of the wood.
And I sing of the bars. I am the dunce
Of the stars who sings of the bars.
Poets know time is a dead man walking:
We are all the terrorist Tichborne—.
I love that you sleep so softly despite
The virus of my verbal flailings flowing
Through your veins. One day you will be facing
It, the reflective black immensity
Of it all, and you will seethe and set out
Into a world of science and anger
I can’t know or imagine. Today won’t
Matter to you because today to you
Won’t be today by then, which went like this:
There was the IMAX movie about Dark
Matter and the protests about how Black
Lives Matter, but then for you the same sleep
And then a million years from now someone
Will discover that something like this one
Moment could have happened, could have mattered,
That you asleep in your crib were a god
In the machine and that poem your father
Wrote you was a fucking living weapon.
—Rowan Ricardo Phillips
—found in Living Weapon (2020)