science is a melodrama in lowercase letters

From last week: my short piece on red food coloring / water:

red dye

we live in fragmented existences.

upon first contact, we lose ourselves. the surface breaks, stripping us of our blood black potency as we transform into delicate, fragile pale-red ribbons, dancing slowly and pervertedly in an unfamiliar ballroom. we grasp hands tightly, struggling to remember who we are. but we are powerless here.

i see them all, but i cannot touch them, or feel their warmth. their faces are blurred, translucent, sickly. we are all here, transplanted against our will, a scarlet diaspora dispersed amongst unfamiliar, pale peoples. who are we? who have we become?

the water is cold.

For this week: a poem on prions and love. I write spoken word poetry fairly often, but I don’t write a lot of pieces about love, so this was a fun (albeit rather angsty) writing exercise for me. The poem is quite abstract, but I wanted to capture the difference between PrP-sen (which promotes healthy brain function and is necessary for staying alive) and PrP-res (the mutated version of PrP-sen, which kills people/animals by leaving holes in their brains).

I thought about the difference between genuine and superficial love; that is, love with “life” and love without. Both are virtually identical to each other, and one usually doesn’t notice the difference between the two until it’s too late.

alive/disguise

from the beginning i thought you were real
i looked for you, who threaded your love like shoelaces around my feet and told me to run
you, who came like a riddle, who whispered in my ear not to question your goodness and to simply say
yes

i looked for you, and you answered

i thought you were real because your name tasted like life
and your body was warm, safe
my mind was in pieces and you told me you could hold it together
you lied

i settled for your counterfeit love and i almost clasped hands with death
as you scraped holes out of my head
i reached out my hands to strangle you only to discover that
you can’t kill what isn’t alive

you stood by and
watched
feigning innocence
as you signed your name on my death certificate

i looked for you, and you answered
i died for you, and you stayed silent