by Brett Rutherford
If you want to understand me,
it’s all in the science, really.
I am not like men.
I am not like women.
I am not an animal at all.
I am the fourth state of matter.
The soul of me
is a plasma core,
my heat contained
in vacuum walls
no cry can penetrate.
Swift currents and fields
hold me in check.
My delicate bell
of unprotected truths
must not be touched,
for I am lethal:
I have the sun’s
incarnate eye chained here.
It is all I can do
to hold it in.
Come not too close.
Do not inquire
what burns within.
I have coped too long
with the break of heart
to need a supplement
to my magnetic fields.
Though I bulge out
ionosphere coronas,
and Northern Lights splay
through the bullet holes
of once-attempted affections,
my furies are self-contained.
A detonation was imminent
when someone came too close,
but one look at my lightning
is usually enough of a warning.
Orbit me at a safe distance.
Be warmed by what I generate.
If space and speech
did not restrain your hand,
if any speck of you leapt to my heart
it would become a barren nucleus
chained like the rest of me
into this welded egg of fire.
No need to feel sorry.
I am fine in here. I will last
as long as sunlight, till gravity
calls everything home to null.
[Revised May 2019]
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