Member Poem

Head trip
 
Flying down
a snowy mountainside,
young Einstein’s sled
approaches hyper-drive.
He speeds past curving pines,
and cabins so distorted
he can see their every side;
on and faster still
till everything is moving
backwards.
He notices the sky turn red;
the world’s colors drain
to monochrome.
The stars look different –
instead of points of light
a bright, central glow
as wavelengths shift
to spectrums unobservable
to human eyes.
On he hurtles in his dream,
feels the crushing pressure
of X-ray radiation,
on into the soft orb
of cosmic microwaves.
Young Einstein wakes,
his exhausted body
compressed against the mattress.
That day,
moving at a sensible speed,
he meditates on
various problematic points
to do with light and energy,
and quite a lot of matter,
and formulates his theory
of relativity.
 
Published in Secrets and Dreams anthology, Kind of a Hurricane Press, 2016