physics loosened. Material things
                   blurred. In class I saw
the metal chair’s particles
        move. It was all so 
Newtonian. I taught the mechanics 
                of meter to students nodding
off and at night the Old Poets’
        syllables stair-stepped 
around my room. Why should the apple,
                  asked Newton, always
descend perpendicularly to the ground?
        Why should the chalk fall
to the linoleum, the stack of papers
                  fly across the floor?
Inelegant movements of the sleepless.
         Long nights I would make my phone
bright and watch the simulated 
                stock ticker make senseless
money for people I will never
        see. Across the country men
make invisible machines
                in a room, I imagine, dark
and whirring with the noises
        their monitors emit. In Minot,
North Dakota, for instance, drone
                operations target men
we will no longer, signed papers say,
         torture. We will not keep them
from sleep or force-feed them
                rectally. We will not
touch them. Once we mastered
        gravity wasn’t distance
a thing of the past. That the earth draws
                it down, the fruit, the flight,
as matter, Newton found, draws the earth
        back to it. In California
nights are clear and frenzied.
                And in the morning my students
explained why they dislike 
        the spondee. For its excessive force.