i was asked, today:
what emotion do you write from?
and the answer was as easy as breathing, thoughtless,
instinctual - *hunger*

and then i paused 
to think, to doubt
this is nature to the physicist, to second-guess,
to absorb the anxiety disorder as being,
well, *natural*, 
disorder as in entropy, 
and not as in the effect of persistent clutter 
on the human mind

that we immediately know the answer 
makes doubtworthy the axioms; 
that we doubt them 
makes them worthy of being considered
true, considered
*real*, side by side in the textbooks with newton
and planck, boltzmann, euler, tesla, all the 
others whose names have been forgotten
(or, far more likely, stolen, which is like being 
forgotten but with more intent, with layers 
of forgetting 
that the forgetting even happened to begin
with caroline herschel, 
with katherine johnson, 
with ada lovelace, 
with marie curie, 
with rosalind franklin, 
with henrietta lacks)

i could keep going ad infinitum, dredge up from the silt where
asteroid fragments and space junk coagulate and wash 
ashore, eventually:
a name i heard once and forgot, or a name 
i've never even heard, that nobody alive 
in the last five hundred years has heard, a name that 
has never yet been spoken, for 
each and every glass plate in the henry draper catalog 

(which, by the way, could be named after any manner
of people, and it would sadden me to pick
only a few, but even that would be better
than what it is now. at least, i tell myself, 
at least it's not as bad as that telescope, 
that *fucking* telescope, 

prismatic eyes 
staring out, out, out farther than ever before,
and yet its namesake still would never 
see the truth of the hands and faces around the periphery, 
the edges of his field 
of vision - and the other thing too - 
which is that we refuse to speak his name 
we honor the shoulders of giants whom 
his kind trampled to reach past gravity
*ad astra per aspera*
*ad infinitum per astra*)

but back to the textbooks, for a moment
back to the scientific method as 
applied to emotion
and the implications of doubt.
we have laid out the steps as they occur 
in nature, on the cosmic blackboard drawing
lines between our martyrs' names 
yet unspoken

thus in this cyclical manner with 
doubt (or what's some synonym?)
inserted between each step 
we find our way to the theory
(in the scientific sense)
by which hunger is universal
and i am penning a hypothesis that actually, 
the emotion i write from is gravity
and i want tenderness the way gravity wants to devour the sun
i hunger for proofs between my jaws 
mouth full of clutter
a thousand damaged rattling cacophonic things
the hunger metamorphoses to a beast
a towering colossus, a wretched radiant thing
and we are back where we started
with the fundamental force driving my thoughts 
to tangible form
*ad astra per corpus*
*per astra ad infinitum*