Mendel's Dominant

C binds to G, A binds to T

rope binds to hands.

Only make this journey

if you think free will a parlor trick of the starry-eyed philosophers;

like ethics, appealing, but ultimately useless.

If you breach the cytoplasm,

draw your sword to stave marauding lysosomes;

with fortitude, and gifts of simple sugars

you may survive to reach the citadel

wherein the double helix wears her crown.

Supplicate,

and beg the question:

Am I tall or dark or fair or

programmed to self-destruct?

May I eat this raspberry cheesecake, flaunt it in the face

of myocardial infarction? Or will you send

clots of avenging erythrocytes to bring me to my knees?

These are the questions that haunt

scientists grown pale from existing under a fluorescent sun.

Will my children bear my blue eyes?

Will they be stronger, brighter,

less prone to nervous attacks and brittle nails?

The scientists are up too late again,

eating things that do not exist in nature

from vending machines,

while chemical revolutions surge on chocolate agar slides.

With no other deity so visible, we unravel genomes

like pig entrails cast across the snow;

prognosticate,

tell me my destiny.

Psychostasy

Lay your heart upon the scales, says the jackal god.

The accused was once an attorney,

but now his mute meat fails to elocute.

In the secrecy of his mind he wonders

if the autopsy room doctors felt a draft

a sharp agitation of wingbeats rising

when sternum or skull was laid open.

Aloud he says, my heart is an organ,

a vivid lump of flesh

shot through with tiny neuropeptide receptors

to make me feel.

He looks down and sees it already in his hands,

streaked white

like a poor cut of beef.

He says I tried, I tried to order the salad

but it was so tasteless.

Remembering his circumstance,

he says to the black-faced jackal:

Return to myth, I have no use for you.

and the god says once more,

Lay your heart upon the scales.

Choice is beyond him now, if ever it wasn't…

he would far rather entrust it to cold steel,

but the scales are gold, the feather

from some bird of dreams.

What's the balance of a soul denied?

As the scales tip and the heart shatters into nothing

an autopsy room doctor looks up

alight with wonder, a child once more

as white feathers rain down like nuclear snow

with weight to crush the world.

Worldview #1

We are God's dice

Snake-eyed and probabilistic

principled in our uncertainty

and free as white rabbits on holiday from the lab

set loose in the forest

to play.

We are fallen images who lack the grace to shatter on contact

with solid ground.

Obtuse to metaphor,

at right angles with every toppled idol

we must now do our taxes and quietly die of truth.

We have put corn in everything but we are far from the earth

and who among us would deny

that the saddest day of our lives

is when we look in the mirror and know our own eyes.

We like ghost stories about zombie cats

and math poems about everchanging light

but we cling to our chains like a child on a playground swing

who cannot make the leap

and trust that gravity will not betray the arc,

defect to chaos and leave him weightless forever.

Like insects in honey we have no desire

to cross that golden sticking point of noncontradiction

but neuroplastics make it possible to see the eternal truth

that everything begins and ends in Copenhagen.