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. Press on it and it generates voltage. You are, literally, electric.

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

The paradigm The universe doesn't pathologize its own variation. Neither do we.

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 spark.
        Move through the world
        and they sing voltage.
      

        Dr. Yasuda knew this.
        He 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.

The universe doesn't pathologize its own variation.

        Storms are not disorders.
        Variation is not deficit.
        The electric bone that bends differently
        is still making the signal.
      

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. 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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