Lost Information – version 3 – Read Poems aka Dinosaurs

ABOUT THE POEM: “Lost Information” delves into the irreversible nature of profound loss, exploring how a fleeting moment of connection or self-surrender can feel like the theft of an unnamed, irreplaceable part of the soul. Contrasting the measurable world of science and craftsmanship with the unique asymmetry of human experience, the poem questions whether justice—or love—can ever truly return the exact particle that vanished when two lives met. It is a meditation on time and the singularity of meaningful events.

She took something from me at first sight-
a thing she never gave.
I dreamed of spells,
Bengali babas murmuring totkas over guttering oil lamps,
of coaxing the vanished fragment home
or at least lulling its ghost to silence.
But sweetheart, I whisper to the mirror,
human life only travels forward.
No love has ever walked back out of the past-
and by love I mean
the exact particle that winked out
the moment her eyes met mine.
If iron were lost, the blacksmith could forge another.
If clay, the potter could spin me a new bowl.
But what vanished had no weight, no shape-
nothing a hand could ever hand back.
When justice finally knocks,
it never brings the precise measure owed.
Sometimes a thimbleful,
sometimes a flood.
Always asymmetrical-
the same law that lets Hawking radiation
leak a black hole’s secrets in scrambled, half-erased whispers.
People trade names, cities, even skins.
Character almost never trades.
If fear of failure was the seed,
it is still the tree.
My trouble isn’t that fear.
My trouble is the ticking.
I am human-
not a proton drifting billions of years in the same orbit,
not an electron, not a photon that outruns time itself.
Everything that truly matters
happens only once.