Revolutions

1.

You are twenty-seven & amazed at the size of the life that one person might live.
I keep thinking in numbers.

2.

Two years ago the overhead light still 
illuminated my childhood bedroom. 

The walls still the same 
shade of green as ten years before that.

3.

A word problem: If there are two weeks until the rheumatology visit

& three days until sixty pills at 750mg runs out, then please 

rate your pain on a scale from 1 to 10.

4.

Four fortnights ago, parents dance with parents I've never seen dance before to a tune
known all their lives. I keep getting my age wrong when people ask. Twenty-eight.
Twenty-nine – time is a monster – I’m sorry, I mean time is a monotonic sequence.
Except when it isn't. Sometimes time is a spiral, space, spring, spool, spectrum.

5.

I used to laugh off sunburns and cancer with equal distance. Now I don't bother to count
sunspots. At least they are symmetric. Now our grandparents dead by a pandemic
in its fifth year. Now incalculable loss becomes simply another variable to account.
The difference between a metric & a measure
is how long you decide to care.

6.

Now our sixth year in New York, but I won't enumerate
how rents jump to the height of “market forces.” 
Q: Tell me a metric that keeps you up at night.
A: Last year was the hottest year since time & temperature & paper were combined.
Q: Tell me how to measure our grief.
A: Now I open my phone, & the weight of children dead by genocide. Impossible to list.

7.

Now the moon
transits the sky

the same way
we saw it

seven years ago.

Twenty-seven, twenty-eight
revolutions

around the sun.
It's no revelation

that too many
revolutionaries were killed

before we were born.

8.
It's been eight years since I took a physics class, but I still know
energy & mass can be converted & light

is produced when nuclear reactions fuse two separate masses
into something greater. The same way I know

that seven years from now we are still two hands
reaching to form something greater. That seventeen years

from now we are finding ways to find each other,
giving N95s & sharing pain management techniques

& checking in with our pods. Twenty-seven
(or thirty-seven or three hundred and seven) years

from now & walls are coming down. Brick by brick
if need be. Still fusing & refusing & still building

& sea levels rise, but empires finally fall. If light
can journey nearly 94 million miles to warm unprotected skin,

to hit an unfurling leaf, to light the horizon ablaze, then
we don't need prophecy to know ecstatic possibility
exists despite the burn. I still want the burn, the heat,
the nuclear reaction of your hand in mine.

0. 

I want nothing else nuclear on my watch in any of these years. No hot war, no military, no war at all. A null set, as in: empty.

Infinite. 

Just the now & twenty-seven years from now & twenty-seven years after that.
Until we wear our wrinkles & sunspots like badges of honor
for the revolutionary act of survival.

Derek Yen writes code in the mornings and everything else in the evenings. A few ideas that he keeps coming back to in his writing include illness, technology, and speculative imagination. He shares an apartment in Brooklyn with his partner and several houseplants. Find him online at speculativeloaf.wordpress.com.