It’s a dirty machine, the universe— 

proof of its unclean cogging is seen

in the bits it spits off, the dirt it flings

from its levering arms: Asteroids.

Asteroids which flee ass over end

to be crater-battered by countless others

and break away piecemeal and plummet

into unsuspecting forgetful planets

who dreamed the last million millennia

until they believed in pure black, utter

lack, silent gravity and the non-greasy 

lubricant of infinity. But it’s not so.

Everything clamors and clangs, tears

and burns. Vastness is no excuse. The evidence

is everywhere, giant rocks whizzing by, fleeing, 

stumbling through unfiltered space like the sparks

from rustic construction. Rocks: the unwhole,

the broken, the residue of the out of control:

Rough, random and often gigantic. Debris.

Because something is happening, and the mess

is the message: stand back, look out, it’s no better

out there than down here: Born, then worn; stable

then labile; rhythmic, asynchronic; pristine

then unclean; rhyming, then not, not at all.

Try asking an asteroid, a refugee from some 

fusion furnace, now too dead-panicked

to speak though it must want to scream,

to wake us, to warn us, to bleed out loud

and save our meaning.