Emaciated Chemistry
Emaciated chemistry
That’s what this is.
She didn’t love me.
She loved the clothes,
the credit cards.
The lip gloss.
& all the other fancy things.
I recall how she looked at me,
With those eyes,
& burned a fire in me,
As I did to her,
Among the neon-lit ambience of the night club.
Emaciated chemistry.
They’re not my countrymen.
It’s not even my country.
Not the one I knew.
It’s a new animal now.
I remember the rolling hills.
Kids playing in the fields,
with the oversized suspenders,
handed down by older siblings,
Their souls inside the Norman Rockwell paintings
Emaciated Chemistry
Why would I profess about my job,
At the dinner table like all the others?
Boss hasn’t given me a new position in decades.
They love me sitting there.
At that desk.
Like it’s my home.
It comes back to the foreground,
How badly in shape they were before me
How they said “we can’t lose”
Only to see them now,
Happy & as ignorant as clams.
Satiated Chemistry
She came home to a U-Haul
with all her treasures nearly packed,
A single credit card, fifteen-hundred dollar limit
To be discontinued
& a note the house was sold,
As was I with her
They new life was just beginning
Satiated Chemistry
I found a spot,
in Baja California,
Ocean waves foamy
The pace so calm
& people friendlier than the oldest family ties
A surf board on the porch.
Papaya on my lips
Satiated Chemistry
A two-day notice
That’s what they received from me.
Utter shock, on their faces
The clattering mind-melt of the boss,
I could see he knew what I meant
When the bill had finally come due
Lovely village girl,
A Polynesian beauty,
Ironically, we laugh
She makes me smile
Always
Community that knows me
Offers me their grandmother’s finest
Spices so new
Herbs essence so deep
& rich inside the meal
New mobile income
Transcending boundary lines
A province that values presence
A new sea
of possibilities
Satiated Chemistry
Reading this as a biochemist, I’m struck by how perfectly you capture the alchemy of human connection: the transformation of energy, bonds breaking and forming, the subtle reactions between presence and absence. “Emaciated chemistry” versus “satiated chemistry” reads almost like a molecular reaction: the exothermic collapse of desire, the endothermic cultivation of self, the equilibrium finally shifting in your favor. Every line pulses like a neuron firing, like molecules finding their optimal configuration: raw, precise, and inevitable. The way you map emotional thermodynamics onto lived experience is brilliant.
Beautiful imagery Miles,every scene was moving in my mind,but it is heartbreaking and true that our feelings are sometimes misused,and that feelings which are honest 💔🥺