Joonho Ko

you exist not

except

in the thin wisps of dreams

like fraying shoelaces, the aglets

fallen out a year ago

My greatest lament is your projection -

reduce the contours along your waist

the warmth of your lips

the chemical in your hair

to the senseless plane.

Spacetime is a four-dimensional topological manifold with a lorentzian metric and a time orientation satisfying the Einstein equations.

And so I claim the paradox.

We stand still but seasons

change, the sun and moon

share the sky’s watan, and the Earth

fails to escape the time continuum.

That is why

I latch onto your protons and electrons,

your inorganic representations,

your notion of existence.

Someday, I’ll meet you again.