Dialectics

If the first law 
of thermodynamics states energy
is neither created nor destroyed

but only changes 
from one form to another, then 
the high school Social Studies teacher 

who says you'll never 
amount to anything is 
the fuel that heats the pistons 

though the dice 
somehow resist the hand 
that shakes the cup, enough 

to land another outcome. 
This isn't an attempt to excuse 
the innate meanness dealt out 

in the original moment—
as if to say the existence of any 
cruelty in the world could be justified 

as long as it becomes 
the means to a different end.
You want to know: who shook  

the sky so violently,
so roughly in his own time
that the coils tightened to almost

combustion;
but whenever he looked up
he could feel only the gravity

that magnetized him 
to the idea that history is only 
bound to repeat itself— forgetting 

the burn of revolutions, 
the spark lit by a single match, 
the outcry that could bring dictators down.