Even When Looking Up, He Thinks He Is Above the Stars

The world was a changed thing / a variant of its former self, and you were / A new ripple in the miles-deep pool of time, / that one breath strumming the tender / Chords of the system.

Even When Looking Up, He Thinks He Is Above the Stars

On Tinder, a man scoffs at my decision to
list my star sign in my profile, wondering how I could

Be so smart and
still believe that astrology and the stars

Could govern anything. I already
know I am going to block him

And maybe delete the app
from my phone, but before I go

I take the bait
and say, it’s like this:

The exact moment your first breath entered the
atmosphere, in that exact millisecond, nothing

Was the same. The world was a changed thing
a variant of its former self, and you were

A new ripple in the miles-deep pool of time,
that one breath strumming the tender

Chords of the system. Then the stars—
the stars took note and took your carbon print

And stamped it into the book of cosmic capacity, chart
-ing the detailed modules of your life, dotting

The landscape of your particular design
documenting your

Ontological quirks
into an official index

Of the texture of your wrongness, of your
sticky sweet compulsions, of why

You talk to your mother the way you do and why
she will allow it, of the exact hue of Pendergrass’

Blues, of how you will carry your
inheritances, of where your pleasures

Will falter and fail. It is an idiomatic film, a snapshot
of what the world will come to know of you before

You even know of you, an expansive diagram
of how you will betray yourself, defying

Your self-determination, giving you
a God you can see. Some bird species

Evolve to be more beautiful and
some choose to survive. None of this

Is man-made or of human making, our
understanding irrelevant in the face of

Its perpetuity, and yet, with an arrogance
so great we question the abundance of

The stars right to its face, all while looking up
at their tricks of entropy, our eyes gleaming

In the presence
of a dead light.