F. J. Bergmann

MELT COMPLETELY

In the lower atmosphere, there's no reason
why you can't have dark matter clusters.
They constantly jostle and bump each other.

If we apply warmth to the ice crystal, its
bodies didn't melt completely, altering
their oval forms into elongated ellipses.

Dark matter may form halos generated
by the animal's metabolism, all else being
equal but not able to move about freely.

Imagine walking into a pitch-black room
with no visible frosting at all; bits of dust,
smoke, and salt locked into specific gravity.

Such observations might also chance on
the concentration of the invisible; how little
is known about the origin of structures.

It is important to note that, although these
statements are correct, there will always be
a few molecules in the shape of tiny heads.

Particles that grow in size become distinctly
larger, about a billion times, enough to
provide a convenient backdrop of sky.

Relatively small worlds, too small to do the
job properly, would be blown away into
an ocean of invisible gas; as simple as that.

Wind, therefore, becomes visible only when
the critical value needed to overcome the
gravitational glue is both yes and no.

How much of it there is, locked into specific
positions, spread more evenly than the
visible, consisting solely of dark losses.

At this point you should realize that water
only changes its disguise to invisible gas.
The moon became plastic, faint, blue.

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"Melt Completely" was entirely constructed from judiciously juxtaposed phrases and sentence fragments selected from rejected copies of pages from various textbooks, mostly representing branches of physics, found in the trash at Kinko's, where I used to work. (I have a perverse passion for run-on sentences as well as an essentially amicable relationship with pure science.) I enjoy the fact that as knowledge becomes more tenuous, speculative, and divergent from the scale of human experience the language describing it becomes more surreal and silly.