Love You Down To Your Star Stuff

“We are made of star-stuff.
We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.”
Carl Sagan · Cosmos, 1980

The bone Your skeleton is piezoelectric. It hums a little song, quietly but measurably.

The star The calcium in your bones was forged in a dying star billions of years before our sun was born.

The paradigm Difference is variation, not deficit. The universe runs on variation. We call it beautiful, and we mean it all the way down to our star stuff.

stimpunks.org · morerealms.com
full text of the poem on the reverse
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Bone Song · full text Stimpunks Foundation × More Realms

Broadside · Open edition
Side B of B

        Your bones are electric.
        Not metaphorically.
        Not as a figure of speech
        borrowed from the poets
        who came before.
      

Literally. Measurably. Piezoelectric.

Press on them and they answer. Too quietly to feel.

        Fukada and Yasuda knew this.
        They pressed on the crystal
        and it answered.
        The crystal was bone.
        The bone was yours.
      

        The calcium that carries that current
        was forged in a star that died
        before our sun was born.
      

You are walking around with stellar ash in your skeleton.

We love you down to your star stuff.

        To the calcium. To the charge.
        To the exact configuration of atoms
        that has never existed before
        and will never exist again.
      

LS.

Where this comes from

The piezoelectricity of bone was measured by Eiichi Fukada and Iwao Yasuda, On the Piezoelectric Effect of Bone (1957), and extended by C. A. L. Bassett. The effect is collagen's — its fibres are arranged without a centre of symmetry and generate charge when sheared. How much of that a walking body generates is still open — wet bone also makes voltage as fluid is squeezed through it, and the two are hard to tell apart. Bone Song, Zine No. 1, carries the argument and the sources. The cosmological framing draws on Carl Sagan, Cosmos (1980). The neurodiversity paradigm language draws on Nick Walker and the Autistic community of InLv — Martijn Dekker, Jim Sinclair, and Autism Network International.

starstuff.earth · stimpunks.org · morerealms.com
Bone Song is Zine No. 1 · starstuff.earth/bone-song-zine
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