Entropy Waltz

By Catt Kingsgrave

I have noticed that things fall apart.

The force of beginning, the surging, the start,

Continues, a pressure within to expand,

Till we find our own place, and we can't reach another one's hand.

Human the race,

And grueling the pace, but stop for awhile and you'll find

Entropy is the finish line.

Gravity plays the tune as we waltz to the moon,

Stately and savage and blind.

We spin into nothing as fast as we dare

Holding each other, pretending we care,

When the force of our atoms pushes within --

Our apotheosis and deadliest sin --

And we ask as we grind ourselves down into silence,

"Why does this happen to me?"

Self-centred and blind

In our own little minds, we escape from our solitude

By grabbing at shadowy mirror reflections

(Too pale and too thin to obscure our perfections.)

And fearing the touch of the poison within

As much as the nothing without our pavanne,

We comfort ourselves that we master our fate

And inflict on our partners the best of our hate

And the worst of our need as we spin our élan

Along toward aphelion.

Cold desperation our rhythm and beat,

We savage each other in search of the heat

And we ask, as we soak in the chill of the void;

"Why does this keep happening to me?"

Into each life a little death must come.

Into every soul, a little finished sum.

A bottom line, a place apart,

(Owned by neither brain nor heart)

Where the only God is silence

And the only peace is dumb

And the wounds we get from living

Can eventually go numb enough to let us take a laugh, perchance,

And let us take a bow,

And to let us take our places for the same old game

The same old flame, the same old Entropy Waltz again.

Somehow.