Defying Physics

By Raundi Moore-Kondo

On the most unromantic of afternoons
you and I came together
like the gusts of wind off the Puget Sound
and the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.

We were complicit deadly chemistry,
set to self-destruct. Not by design—
but by our combined essence.

I’d been born into bondage
and was willing to lose limbs
for a few sweet reverberations of freedom.

You wore my rhythms like instinct
and committed seduction at a nuclear
and unconscionable level.

Tuning into me like hi-def,
crystal-clear radio. Filtering out
every frequency apart from mine.

Your decisive search for harmonics
made for the slightest damping.
It was exquisitely timed foreplay
meant only to prolong the violence.

Your tones exhumed new depths
in me and caused my crests to sky-rise.
When your vibrato plied at my wavelengths
they spread themselves apart and wide.

Willing, but completely unprepared
to be ravaged and consumed
by the synergy of our mutually-exclusive,
ever-heartening amplitude.

The resonance was fleeting.
It was our dissonance that caused me to break
so unevenly.

All that writhing and twisting
was just another way to escape
the structure that contained me.

Like Solomon’s most misinterpreted song,
your timbre degraded and dissolved
during my demolition.

You were nothing more than a cunning linguist
armed with a lethal aero-elastic flutter.

I tried to defy physics and became life imitating
natural disaster—
an act of God.

I tore myself apart to become one with you,
to become something new.
If only there’d been a beautiful sound
to crumble into.