#schrodinger
They say a cat waits in a box,
alive and dead
until someone dares to look.
I know that cat.
I’ve worn its skin,
breathed both life and ending
in the same trembling second.
Every truth I open
kills another illusion.
Every lie I keep
lets another ghost breathe.
The box isn’t in the lab —
it’s in the chest.
It hums behind the ribs,
a purr, a bomb, a prayer.
We all sit there,
half dream, half dust,
waiting for the moment
we finally look,
and become
whatever survives the sight.
—Vazago
Oct 23, 2025
Oct 23, 2025 at 8:23 AM UTC
Photosynthetic void—walls bereft of chroma,
No photon cascade, no serotonin spectra.
A chamber of entropy,
Where mitosis mourns in monochrome.
Chrono-displacement:
We arrived at 8:20,
But spacetime dilated—
A tachyon chase beneath scalpel orbit.
Dual patient states—pre-op/post-op—
Entangled in Schrödinger’s queue,
Their vitals suspended
In probabilistic purgatory.
The medic? A quantum migrant.
From outpost to outpost,
Clinic to cloud,
A baryon of ambition, unbound by Hippocratic gravity.
Washroom:
A microbial biome of neglect.
Fee:
A kilojoule transaction for placebo empathy.
This isn’t care.
It’s thermodynamic collapse
In a coat of sterilized prestige.
He holds the scalpel,
Yet forgets:
The heart is not a ledger.
And time is not his to hoard.
Sep 30, 2025
Sep 30, 2025 at 10:06 AM UTC
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
Sep 15, 2020
Sep 15, 2020 at 10:33 AM UTC
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
May 8, 2020
May 8, 2020 at 4:11 PM UTC
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
Feb 13, 2017
Feb 13, 2017 at 2:29 AM UTC
Not alive, and not dead, within an unopened box
don't remember being fed, not sure if there's a lock
I think that I'm breathing, but I can't really tell
no coughing and no sneezing, no discernible scent or smell
Existence a concept not defined in reality
not knowing any answers, or in the darkness see
please, please, please open up the top
so all my doubts and fears, will ultimately stop
Dec 22, 2016
Dec 22, 2016 at 12:51 PM UTC