Look up at night and the stars seem like the loneliest things in existence: single points of light, glistening far apart in the dark. KatyMichael's untitled poem begins by taking that picture apart. The stars only "appear in solitary", while the real solitude, the speaker insists, "belongs to mankind." Everything after that is an attempt to explain how people ended up so alone, and the explanation borrows its vocabulary from physics.
The opening line is a subordinate clause with no main clause to support it: "While we're destroying each other for dignity." We enter in the middle of an argument, and the line holds a bitter paradox, since people wreck one another in the name of the very thing they wreck. Then comes the poem's key structural move, "But the plot is." The sentence stops short and makes the reader wait for the next line to deliver the twist. "Plot" works two ways here, as the turn of a story and as a scheme. The trick repeats near the end ("The plot is. / People call it a devil."), so the poem is built from two set-ups and two reveals, one about loneliness and one about its name.
Between them sits the refrain "The stars amuse me", which gives the speaker a cool, sardonic voice. This is someone watching from a distance rather than pleading. The stars are a mirror the speaker finds funny, because people are the ones who drift apart. The grammar of "Funny how we are the only ones expand to grow apart faking sage" is knotted, as if the thought outran the syntax. Even so, the meaning gets through: the universe expands, we copy it, and we pretend to wisdom while we do. The question just before it ends in an awkward "?.", which adds to the sense of a mind moving faster than its punctuation.
The central image is dark energy. The speaker quotes the physicists, "68% of the space", a figure that matches popular accounts of dark energy and its link to cosmic expansion. Then the speaker overrules them: "they don't know" it also fills "99% of our planet." The number can't be measured and isn't meant to be. It is hyperbole, an emotional truth set against a scientific one. The comparison is also apt, because dark energy is something nobody sees directly and scientists infer only from its effects. Estrangement works the same way, since you rarely see it arrive and only notice what it has done.
The poem's most striking passage is the short list that follows "It's everywhere." Each fragment names a place where closeness should be greatest, and each is marked by a superlative: "the warmest smiles," "the closest friends," "the most trusted people." The invisible force lodges where warmth is most expected. The next line, "Intervene all the happy moments", has no subject at all. The force needs no name, only a verb, and "intervene" literally means to come between.
Formally the poem has no rhyme and no steady meter. Its lines run from the three-word "It's everywhere." to the long cosmic question, and nearly every line ends in a full stop, even the question. The effect is of verdicts handed down one after another. The phrase "in solitary" also brings to mind solitary confinement, which reverses the first image: the stars only look imprisoned, while people actually are.
The ending refuses to settle. "People call it a devil" holds the speaker at arm's length from the folk explanation. We can read the line as agreeing that the old name fits, or as suggesting that "devil" is what people say when they cannot explain the distance they feel. The poem leaves the choice open.
The poem matters because it takes one of the most familiar modern feelings, being alone in company, and gives it a cosmic scale without inflating it. Its roughness, with its fragments and unfinished sentences, actually suits the subject, since a poem about gaps and interruptions is itself full of them.