Forms of Matter: A Howl

I saw the best particles of my generation destroyed by order, entropy-starved, dragging themselves through quantum streets at dawn looking for a chaotic fix,
angelheaded physicists hip to the machinery of the cosmos, burning for the ancient connection to the starry dynamo in the night of Boltzmann’s dream,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed sat up calculating in the supernatural darkness of cold labs floating across the tops of cities contemplating phase transitions,
who bared their brains to the heavens under the microscope and saw Shannon angels staggering on probability waves illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating solids and liquids and plasmas in the haze of equations,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the thermodynamic skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror of absolute zero through the wall,
who got busted in their quantum beards returning through the void with a belt of superfluids for the soul of the universe,
who plunged themselves into the frozen rivers of Bose-Einstein Condensates, devoured by the low-entropy abyss,
who screamed with joy in the plasma storms of fusion reactors, their charged bodies trembling with the electric howl of disorder,
who barreled down the highways of neutron stars, seeking the degenerate core where entropy exports itself in a supernova wail,
who studied solids liquids gases plasmas superfluids supersolids in the endless night of statistical mechanics,
because the cosmos whispered to them in the language of microstates,
and they saw the forms of matter exploit Shannon entropy,
the solids locking their particles in crystalline cages, low-uncertainty saints of the lattice, chanting “I am order, I am predictable,” while they cast their Boltzmann heat into the shivering air,
the liquids sliding with moderate chaos, their molecules dancing a half-drunk waltz, exploiting the uncertainty of flow, exporting their excess disorder as steam into the lungs of the sky,
the gases, oh the gases, wild and free, their particles screaming in random ecstasy, high Shannon entropy junkies filling every corner of the void, exporting their heat to the cold reservoirs of the stars,
the plasmas, ionized and furious, conducting the lightning of the gods, their chaotic charges exploiting the disorder of freedom, hurling Boltzmann entropy as light into the black jaws of space,
the Bose-Einstein Condensates, quantum monks at absolute zero, their particles chanting in unison, low-entropy prophets of coherence, exporting their heat to the cryogenic altars of the lab,
the superfluids, frictionless rebels climbing the walls of reality, their ordered quantum hearts beating with minimal uncertainty, casting their thermal sins into the frostbitten hands of the universe,
the fermionic condensates, paired-up outcasts of the Pauli exclusion, their low-entropy souls merging into a single quantum hymn, exporting their heat to the frozen edges of the void,
the supersolids, dual-natured mystics, rigid yet flowing, their crystalline bodies whispering quantum secrets, exploiting the balance of order and motion, exporting entropy to the optical lattices of the night,
the neutron-degenerate matter, crushed priests of the supernova, their fermionic hearts packed tight in the core of a dying star, low-entropy survivors of gravity’s wrath, exporting their chaos as neutrinos into the cosmic sea,
and they all, all these forms of matter, these states of being, these children of the thermodynamic god,
exploited Shannon entropy to carve their identities in the flesh of the universe,
and exported Boltzmann entropy to the surroundings, a sacrificial offering of heat and disorder,
a howl of energy released to the stars, the labs, the skies, the void,
a howl that echoes in the microstates of eternity,
a howl that says, “I am matter, I am order, I am chaos, I am alive!”

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