Introduction to Quantum Theory

Lyrics

There are only so many parallel universes that concern us. In one, he isn't dead. In another, you drink light with your hands all winter. There is a universe in which no one is lying emptied in the street as the gas station burns, a universe in which our mothers haven't learned to wrap their bones in each small grief they've found. There is a universe in which there is no difference between the past and the ground. Another where the oceans pull the moon. And so on. This is an incomplete list. It has been abridged for your comfort. I could tell you about the many universes in which bad things happen to people other than the people you love. Yes, in another life, it's someone else's sister who climbs to the roof that night. In another life, the boys rise darkly from the asphalt to choke the engines of cruisers, and no one gives birth chained to a hospital bed, and no one's child washes blue, ashore. Sure. You can have these worlds. You can warm them in your hands at night. But know: by signing, you agree also to be responsible for the universe where the oceans glow red, the universe where what we call shadow is pulsing with the musk of hooves, and especially the one in which humans exist, but only in the nightmares of small children. Will you hold that one too? The version of the story that never learned to consider sound? and the one where sound is only the opposite of metal? and the one where the sound of metal is never enough to quiet the dead?