Vocal chords stripped like paint and glue

from black-slicked steel,

God’s bruised knuckles clasped round

the hilt of the chisel.  He left me

wide eyes, pricked ear, babbling lips

like koi drowning in summer breeze

but from my bones he drew stasis,

wrapped it round sound

until I became the radiation

of black holes.

They didn’t know

for years that I could contribute

at all, only thought I absorbed

what they threw at me

and spit it back out through my other ear

that they could not yet find.

They couldn’t see that I had the secrets

of string theory strung through

the paint strips at my feet;

Turing’s forgotten papers burnt

in the blow torch God used to

pull steel from welded steel.

Molten metal dripped to concrete

and I was forced to watch

as they called to the world that I

had nothing in my silent frame.

At home I wrote them all letters,

pasted them on my walls and door

and covered every window pane until

light was eclipsed by tape and purple ink

on tea-stained notebook leaves.

I wrote the general theory

of relativity a thousand years

before Einstein happened

upon the scribbled words in his desk drawer.

I quantified the universe while Heisenberg

still scratched his head, stumped

in the machinations of uncertainty.

I imagined imaginary time and

just for a laugh called it

i in my own image

with the blood of

God’s knuckles still

spattered on my tennis shoes.

Some day, I thought, they would find

that inside my head had lain

the theory of everything but

all they could hear was my

silence.