I'm breaking one of my own self-imposed rules - that of repeated material. I cited a few lines from this poem several months ago after finding it via riley dog, using the ones that caught my one-lining eye most. Tonight however I feel moved to revisit it in its entirety, which adds a certain power to those words.

Quantification

What we do in doorways and in kitchens
might be explained with the laws of physics.

Walking home, tripping over another’s tongue,
let’s call that fusion, hands clasped tight enough
to turn coal to diamonds, air to stone.

Break-ups in parking lots or on porches,
name that old song fission, the mechanism
of separation and dissolution.

Newton’s Third Law: all actions have
their equal and opposite reactions.
You cannot touch without being touched.
Press against skin and skin presses against you.

The metaphor becomes strained. It snaps.
You can harm without being hurt.
You can love without being loved.

Physics’ linear progressions explain
nothing. There are no systematic laws
for the heart, save one: it beats.

~Jake Swearingen, from GHOTI FISH