It’s my favorite word and the most frightening.
A self-negating word, not even a ghostly
Idea, or an empty round, a noose tightening
Around itself, and a stern critic of “mostly.”
We use it mostly in a soft, relative sense,
As if it were a verb in more than the past tense,
Existing by not, to describe what isn’t there.
I had a cupboard, but the cupboard was bare.
We think we know variable interstices —
Between Andromeda and the Milky Way,
And between different but similar species —
Such nothings are nothing but what’s lost in decay.
Real nothing, if it exists, should freeze the soul.
In death we’ll dive into light or a rimless hole.