Loose Limits

(This poem is best viewed on a PC)

Black holes are inescapable, bottomless pits of mine, 

mine, mine, mine. Fated to feed an endless hunger,

they must keep amassing, else vanish. Desperate 

for a natural border against foreign invasion,

Ivan the Terrible expanded the Russian Empire 

eastwards. They reached the end of the world

& continued west. Before 1954, no accounts of humans 

running a mile within four minutes. Roger Bannister

broke the record. 1755+ others broke his.

Everywhere, things valued are rusting in corners,

while something discarded continues to persist.

The universe is a vast domestic landfill, a lost

and found thrift store, an eternal recycle bin

of energy and mass. The slaughter of uneaten prey

is habitual in most predators: jaguars, leopards, hyenas,

humans, damselflies, jellyfish. This bloodlust is surplus

killing. Death by overwork is so common in Japan 

that there’s a word for it: Karoshi. Responsibility

is the leading cause of stroke & heart disease. Icarus fell in love 

with heights. Augustus Gloop drowned while quenching

his chocolate gluttony. Daenerys took back the throne 

but only after razing her home to the ground. Entombed

with the First Qin Emperor are his dismembered 

concubines. He needed validation, even after death.

Millenia later, a global village with a dopamine pandemic.

An always online, onward moving more, more, more,

more. Within Earth, fiery pits of magma sit waiting,

aching to unleash hell, hungry for land to consume.