Soft Light

Down to my last cigarette and you ask me whether it's a wave or a particle.  Crazy.  Everything between dream and death is fair game and all I want right now is a drink but I can't have one.  So don't bore me with stuff even Ray Carver wouldn't touch.  What we talk about is better left unsaid most days.  Cloistered sisters shout, "Throw away your bucket; jump into the ocean!"

     Wave-particle duality postulates that all particles exhibit both wave and particle properties.

Edward Steichen, "Ascending"

Paris, 1902

You say there's a difference between her skin and her scent.  Crazy.  Just let me feel that reticulate curve of her body once more and I'll tell you a story.  Shimmering planet and summer lightning bug hovering high in a pine tree is all the same to a man who needs glasses.  I don't care about exoteric or esoteric and I don't know right from wrong on certain days.  I swim upstream.

         A central concept of quantum mechanics, this duality       

   addresses the inability of classical concepts like "particle" and  

  "wave" to fully describe the behavior of quantum-scale objects.

I am not lonely or afraid or sad but I do have this wish to come closer into her orbit and celebrate simple things in silence.  But crazy doesn't cover everything and talk is cheap.  Fish rarely surrender they find refuge behind rocks.

          Standard interpretations of quantum mechanics explain this paradox as a fundamental property of the Universe,

I don't want to debate I want a smoke.

   ...while alternative interpretations explain the duality as an emergent, second-order consequence of various limitations of the observer.

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