When the universe begins to rip apart
in they say about ten billion years,
I will still love your hair.
They say a lot of things, though.
They say it’ll take a million years
for our laptops to decompose
and half that for Hale Bopp
to pop back out of ’97 trailing
311 and Goo Goo Dolls lyrics
through the turned-off television night,
and that around the same time, a soda bottle
will fall from the evacuated heavens
on a tiny bar napkin-parachute
with a yellowed note inside reading,
“Seriously, your hair looks great,”
though I added that last bit,
because when this charred and lifeless
stone slips into its eventual
bright death in the sun like an old man
being helped into a motel hot tub,
every scattered particle of me
will still feel this way about your hair.
I mean, look at the size of us.
Quick, come here, give me your number
before it gets so hot in this crampy little dive
all multicellular life forms turn
to glass cleaner and we’re just a couple
of nude protozoans trying to find the vague
genitalia on the molten plastic of us.
Quick, before language itself ceases to exist,
hence my taking this moment
to tell you how I feel about your hair
and claiming this wobbly stool, whereupon I will
perform now for any skeptics in attendance
my turn-into-an-enormous-moth trick—watch
how I drum my body against the light.