night wears a skin
of cold velvet
stippled with pores
through which illumination
prickles as the intergalactic whiskers
of Schrodinger's cat
catching the scent of gravity

It’s Hard Not To Be Optimistic: An Updated Sonnet to Science
by Michael R. Burch

“DNA has cured deadly diseases and allowed
labs to create animals with fantastic new
features.” ― U.S. News & World Report

It’s hard not to be optimistic
when things are so wondrously futuristic:
when DNA, our new Louie Pasteur,
can effect an autonomous, miraculous cure,
while labs churn out fluorescent monkeys
who, with infinite typewriters, might soon outdo USN&WR’s flunkeys.

It’s hard not to be optimistic
when the world is so delightfully pluralistic:
when Schrödinger’s cat is both dead and alive,
and Hawking says time can run backwards. We thrive,
befuddled drones, on someone else’s regurgitated nectar,
while our cheers drown out poet-alarmists who might Hector

the Achilles heel of pure science (common sense)
and reporters who tap out supersillyous nonsense.

NOTE: I am a fan of both real science and science fiction, and I like to think I can tell the difference, at least between the two extremes. I feel confident that Schrödinger didn’t think the cat in his famous experiment was both dead and alive. Rather, he was pointing out that we can’t know until we open the box, scratchings and smell aside. While traveling backwards in time is great for science fiction, it seems extremely doubtful as a practical application. And as for DNA curing deadly diseases ... well, it must have created them, so perhaps don’t give it too much credit!

Submitted to U.S. News & World Report

Dear Editor,

While I’m usually a fan of your magazine, as a writer I must take to task the Frankensteinian logic of the excerpt I cited, and I challenge you to publish my “letter” as proof that poets do have a function in the third millennium, even if it is only to suggest that paid writers should not create such outlandish, freakish horrors of the English language.

Somewhat irked, but still a fan,
Michael R. Burch

Keywords/Tags: science, fiction, quantum, physics, Hawking, Schrodinger, cat, DNA, infinite, monkeys, typewriters, Shakespeare, lab, animals, new, features

and in the in-between
of my heartbeats
the empty space where no blood is pumped
...might be a split second,
might be a second and a half,
or three quarters...
we are both dead and alive
we are both conscious and lifeless
schrodinger's thump thump thump
and blank blank blank
and alive, dead, alive, dead, alive ...
and at any blink of your eye that little spot
where your heart rests from all the work it does
could be still forever
and you never know when your poor,
over-worked little heart
will give up the will to keep beating
because you can't pump blood steadily without break
but you can surely halt
and be totally grounded
the energy trickles away like a dripping tap
one day it stops dripping