Though Hawking’s calculations exposed the leak,
                                                                                 it turns out that
it would take longer
                                 than the life of our universe
                                                                              (however starlight
and mostly-empty space add up?)
                                                        for a black hole to explode and
re-scatter matter
                           into whatever’s circulating out there?
                                                                                         But now
if we enter a black hole—
                                          one of those fathomless trapdoors
gulping gobs of fermions and interstellar light
                                                                           like there’s no
tomorrow—it seems there’s another way to go:
                                                                             we can be crushed
traditionally by unimaginable gravity,
                                                              or now, flash-fried
by a firewall of energy
                                     faster than a Mars bar at a county fair.
Einstein rejected his own calculations
                                                              predicting black holes
in which bosons, leptons, muons—
                                                         what-have-you—warp and
disappear, where every spec
                                               and parsec, dot, dash, and
anything in-between go missing . . .
                                                           where it’s lights out
all around. . . . 
                          But we’re not going there . . .
                                                                          or anywhere,
which is the more pressing metaphysical problem
on our temporal plates,
                                                  a ton of bricks still being a ton of bricks
for every purpose on earth
                                            where it feels like we have all
the gravity we’re ever going to need
                                                            regardless of these
matter and light-sucking beasts
                                                   millions of times more massive
 than our sun, pulsing
                                    at the hearts of most galaxies or
otherwise loitering in the cosmos—
                                                         unseeable left-overs
of dead,
               imploded stars polka-dotting holes in space-time
like sprinkles on your
                                    Dunkin’ Donut. . . .

                                                                   So what are you
going to believe—
                              every hadron mashed in a cosmic compactor,
or, otherwise inconceivably
                                             zapped?
                                                         It could be we’re holding
another paper bag
                              of theory
                                             with a zillion numbers yet to be
crunched
                 in an attempt to make sense of it all
                                                                           now and into
a future, if we have one,
                                         as we spin around and face the far
from abstract dark,
                                feeling we still have all the time
in the world?