Diamond, in slow collapse
A lattice once thought eternal -- here it warps under the weight of its own brilliance, edges softening like wax in the afternoon sun.
read the fragmentTANSO
C₆ -- atomic number 6
CENTER
Graphite, sheets adrift
Layers slip past each other in a quiet exodus. Each plane carries a memory of pressure it no longer remembers feeling.
trace the layersFullerene, hollow choir
Sixty atoms fold themselves into a whisper of a sphere. Inside: nothing, and everything -- the held breath of geometry.
enter the cageField notes from the dream-laboratory
The molecules wear soft uniforms today. The reagents have stopped reacting and started rehearsing. Hydrogen drifts off-script. Oxygen forgets its valence.
Across the bench, a single bond becomes a ribbon, then a road, then a song.
turn the pagePolymer, unspooled
A long molecule lays itself down in the grass. It tells you it is tired of being useful. You sit beside it and say nothing.
listen quietlyPi, melting upward
The double bond rises like a wisp of smoke from a forgotten cigarette. Sigma stays, holds the rest of the room together.
follow the smokeInventory of impossible reactions
- C + dusk → warm graphite, scent of paper
- 2C ≡ C + memory → a chord struck once in 1962
- diamond → pollen, given enough time
- graphene → a single sentence, perfectly flat
- soot → the shadow of a kettle
Carbon, accounted for
In your bones, in the coffee cooling beside you, in the slow ink drying on this page -- the same six protons, dressed in different weather.
tally the warmtha dream of carbon, a center that drifts