A braid of unknowing I tie before you

The universe is more dark matter than we are

water. Esoteric as god — the question

of our times. Like who taught us to be

unkind, if we breathe free

will, are we all another, am I you, you me,

what came first — dream or the dreamer,

are there more nebulae in sky than rain,

nature vs rapture, nurture vs murmur,

write vs right? When we do not know

what it is, we lullaby ourselves by knowing

what it is not. Dark matter is not

failed stars, the song of a blazing

comet, a vessel of strings, a cobweb

of gas. We have more questions

than solutions, more to amass than shed,

more dark than crows permit, more hunger

than thirst, more we do not see than we can

touch, more we want to lynch than let live.

Dark matter fingerprints a depression

on the moon, the great pull knifes

sunrays, glues galaxies together. In a cousin 

universe when God said let there be light, 

someone forgot to flick it on.

Imagine something invisible, tabooed

with the kind of strength responsible

for the structure of the whole fucking universe.

Imagine something invisible. Imagine something.

What we don't understand or fear we call God.

The sun has twelve names in a country I no

longer wish to inhabit. People visit when they need.

Worship grams of unknown, kneel against ghosts,

cobras, trees, Orion, the Pacific ocean, a cow

with an extra leg between her neck and shoulder.

Dark matter is subzero. If we bore

it into skin, we too will learn. To stay cool

within an explosion. Together in an erosion,

dry in an ocean, dubious in our devotion,

calm in our unknowing. When we don't know,

we guess, we suppose, we propose dinosaurs

faced extinction because of dark matter and we

could be next in queue to have our bones

assembled by archeologists of a secret species

in a quantum epoch. Dark matter sifts through

me to rift through you to mist through your

mother like ether without touch —

could sphinx into ionized plasma,

overhaul the sun, jet us into debris

blueshifting around the earth. There is

so much we do not see with power

to kill us – a sniper, an earthquake,

a spider, a heartache. If you're scared,

know that it all might be a hoax.

That we should be rooting for

benevolent aliens, a female god,

a second sun, a third coming.

If not, let us go take a run

in the sheer black

of the universe. We have enough

nothingness, commas, supernovas.

We do not have to die

to know the dark.