nitrogen/oxygen

It’s the nitrogen and oxygen
The flotsam and jetsam
Perfect equilibrium
To contorting continuum
Balanced on a rope pulled
Taught and thin
Over shudders of the earth
Shaking us off with spin.

It’s the invisible threads
Stronger than string
Tying us down
Locking us in.

It’s the fumes we secrete
That smother the streets
Strangle the seas
And stop the trees
From being able to breathe
Suffocating leaves
Like infectious disease.

It’s the way of the milky way
With earth as its iris.

It’s your last lingering kiss
Before lips form words
That shout till they’re heard.

It’s having the universe down your throat.
Saturn’s rings as skin
Noah’s boat steering through
Styx’s swell deep within.

It’s the vibration of the beat
of yourheart on repeat as you sleep
Through the melody of me.

It’s the way our bodies know no words.

It’s the thundering herds across the savanna's plain.

It’s the ebb and the flow as the whale road stirs.

It’s the pain inside amplified by the
Need to recognise that it’s not my own
But of every living thing that finds no home
In the thoughts that are sown in our heads
from when we start to grow
Till when we’re pushing up daisies, dead.

It’s the need to know answers before they’re shown
Before tomorrows paper lets us know
The economic and the astronomic,
The reaches of human limits.

It’s the way my atoms are your atoms
And an atom is what we’ll become
It’s the power of the bomb
When they force them in two
It’s the force we’d succumb to
If they split us to one.

It’s the way that every word of every religion
Is open to endless manipulation.

It’s the way the kids knees knock
As blood drips through breeze blocks.

It’s the way that the clock
Will never unlock the secrets
That feast in silence
To create greed and violence.

It’s the way that the countdown
Has already begun.

It’s the way that the universe
So carefully spun
Splits at the seams and
Starts coming undone.

It’s all that we’ve done and all that we’ve seen
Becoming as fragile as lithium dreams
As indelible as ink across a pure white screen.

It’s the sound as Tiresias screams
That it’s all been foreseen.

It’s the thrill of living
And the thrill of dying
The fear of not knowing but having an inkling
It’s the nothing that keeps stopping us hoping
It’s the everything that keeps keeping us going.