A ball of twine is about the least glamorous picture of the universe imaginable, and that is why Mike Stone's opening line works so well. "Some say the world's a ball of twine" takes string theory, a famously forbidding branch of physics, and shrinks it to something from a kitchen drawer. The title does the same job. "String Theory" names the science, while "twine" hints at a tangle, something wound up and knotted, which is how the speaker's feelings turn out to be. "Some say" keeps the speaker at arm's length from the idea, like someone repeating gossip, yet by the end the poem is staking everything on it.
The first move is to enlarge reality: "Not three dimensions, but eleven." The split that follows, "Eight of space and three of time," makes neat arithmetic, though popular accounts of eleven-dimensional theories usually speak of ten dimensions of space and one of time. Whatever the reason for the change, what matters is the number, because eleven gives the speaker a great many places in which to exist. Then love walks in and the tone swerves. "Love slides down the path to heaven" is a slightly wrong picture, since heaven is traditionally up. A path that slides downward promises ease and then delivers a fall. "Collapses" has a scientific ring, as stars and structures collapse, but it also describes a failing relationship. "Disaffection" is a cool, almost bureaucratic word for what is presumably a painful loss. Judging by that understatement, the speaker keeps feeling at a distance by dressing it in formal language.
The form seems to collapse along with the love. The opening four lines set up a pattern: "twine" and "time" are a near-rhyme, and "eleven" and "heaven" a closer one. Then "disaffection" arrives at the end of the fifth line and finds no partner. It is also the longest line in the poem, about ten syllables against the eight or nine before it, so the line about collapse is the one that sprawls. After that, the lines shrink. "Exists in all eleven" has barely six syllables. "Eleven" comes back as an end word, repeated rather than rhymed with anything new, like a mind circling the same number. The spacing also matters, because the lines arrive one at a time, and the last two sit alone.
The turn comes with "Being as how a part of me / Exists in all eleven." The phrase "Being as how" is plain-spoken and slightly legalistic, and it makes what follows sound like the premise of a proof. The line break after "me" gives the self a moment to stand alone before it is spread across the dimensions. Two words then carry the argument, "one" and "all." "Were I to kill myself in one" is blunt, with no euphemism. As printed, a full stop cuts the sentence off there, so the condition and its consequence land as separate blows. The conclusion is almost entirely one-syllable words: "I'd be dead in all of them." The final word, "them," is telling. The dimensions are now an impersonal crowd, while "I" is dead in every one.
Much popular talk about parallel worlds is oddly comforting, since it suggests that somewhere a luckier version of us gets through. Stone reverses that. His speaker finds no loophole, because if a part of the self lives in every dimension, no dimension offers an exit. The poem never says whether this works as a deterrent, a despairing conclusion or a bleak joke, and its deadpan tone allows all three. Because it is about suicide, the poem deserves to be read seriously, and it is worth noticing that it reasons about the subject rather than glamorising it.
That combination is its achievement. In nine short lines it sets the vocabulary of cosmology against a private crisis, borrows the shape of a logical argument (a premise, a "since," a conclusion), and lets the form fray at the moment the feeling does. The result is a poem whose cleverness does not soften its subject. The neatness of the logic is exactly what makes the ending so chilling.