"Many a physics graduate student has gnashed her teeth in frustration over the mathematics of general relativity. Perhaps she should try envisioning a flat, boundless desert, with rocks of various sizes scattered across its surface, whose mass creates dips of various depths in the sand. A sturdy canopy looms over that desert, stretched tightly over a skeleton of tent poles linked by bars, matching the rises and dips in the sand beneath it. The desert is all the matter and energy in the universe, while the canopy is the geometry of space-time. The poles and bars are the equations of general relativity, connecting the stuff of the universe with the shape of the universe. As Halpern writes: “Mass and energy warp space-time, telling it where and how to curve. The shape of space-time, in turn, governs how things move within it.” ------------------------------------------------------- My mass and my energy are both warped, so the where's and the how's and the eyes of my curves are the poles and the bars of behind which I relentlessly cease to exist, only to seize what lies beyond the constraints of time and space, as eye wait for the bus to stop in the No Standing zone The Bus Poet Stop!