Neutron Star Mechanics

Neutron‑Star Mechanics

Binding Energy
There is a pressure in you that no vacuum can relieve.
No corridor in space is safe from the weight you carry;
gravity squared itself inside your chest
the moment childhood detonated,
and the crust fused before anyone could pry it open.

The greater the compression, the smaller the star,
the heavier the heart.
Astronomers call that resilience;
I have held it and called it sorrow.

Spin‑Down
You revolve—fast, blur‑fast—
trying, always trying to shed momentum,
I watch the torque of your intentions:
each apology a strobe;
each vow to be gentle a pulse I count in millisecond beats.

But conservation of angular momentum is cruel.
No matter how earnest the braking mechanism,
a collapsed core keeps spinning.

Magnetar Flares
What erupts from you is not malice,
just physics:
crustal fractures in a field wound too tight.
The flare arrives before the warning reaches me,
and I burn because that is what gamma rays do
to whatever stands nearby.

I know you recoil at the wreckage,
the way the ionized air smells of people you love.
You plead with the magnetosphere,
command it to hush—
yet stress lines keep crawling across the shell.

Gravitational Waves
Sometimes, in the dark between disasters,
I feel ripples you never meant to send:
the low‑frequency hum of shame
travelling outward at the speed of care.
I catch it in my instruments,
turn data into empathy,
translate curvature into a language
you can almost believe.

Stellar Archaeology
It isn’t fair to fault a remnant
for the violence of the supernova that birthed it.
The catalogued record shows
carbon‑silicate dust, shocked hydrogen, torn iron—
a childhood written in ejecta.
You were shaped by blast waves
long before you had any orbiters to wound.

Event Horizon
Loving you was not an accretion I fell into once;
it is a periapsis I chose, again and again,
steering past the spindown debris,
staying just outside the line where light can’t return.
There, I held my station,
sending telemetry,
hoping in vain for a day for a reprieve
and a softer law—
something beyond conservation, beyond damage—
could finally take hold.

Escape Velocity
Then one day I awoke a rogue planet—
a fractured stone cast free into the void.
Or, on some rock in space, somehow,
orbiting doubt, its truth held only
in the scars I carry through the dark.