"celled" poems
the mushroom may
grow next to
other mushrooms
but not on top of them.
Two may decide
to grow along side
one another.
they may lean
so close that
it seems their
base is one,
but still each
stands level but
seperate on the
same ground.
look even closer
and the individual
mushroom is, itself,
a relationship of its own.
each mushroom,
from stem to cap,
is a population of
individual and free
single celled organisms
who bond together
for strength and structure,
to abet the survival of all.
really puts the
human condition
in perspective.
Apr 12, 2010
Apr 12, 2010 at 5:59 AM UTC
It’s bad enough I’m just known as
that squiggly piece of the alphabet
but what’s worse are the jokes of
Why the long face Kevin?
Those are the times when I wish
I could give as good as I get
it's not as bad as facing the guys
with bloated stomach and ***
and have the amoebas ribbing me
incessantly
****** single celled creatures**
They have an idea, but they can’t guess
Poseidon take you Janet!
for leaving me in such a mess!
You take all of me without leaving
just a single ounce of pleasure
and I’m left birthing
your demon spawn
You were just a mistress Seahorse
in disguise weren’t you?
I’m no longer an oddity
now I’m something less
*Seahorse blues
a male in distress*
Oct 24, 2013
Oct 24, 2013 at 8:49 AM UTC
I see the rabbits feeding on the grass
My heart is filled with joy
Their life is precious
I see the vultures feeding on the rabbits
My heart is filled with joy
Their life is precious
That's what I never understood about coffins
Life is about expanding your prison cell as much as you can
There's no requirement to be contained once it's over
Our nutriance to the Earth
Is our nutrients into Earth
All creatures that die on this planet
Become a part of it
The Debt they paid to the future
The Debt that is always collected on
We travel nonchalantly on their corpses
Wishing they could appreciate
That each and every one of them
Was one step closer to sentience
This planet's passion project
Could the first single-celled organism
Comprehend my humiliation?
When the first creature walked on land
Was it anticipating my shame?
Did it sprout wings
To give me nightmares of dying in an airplane?
Did ancient Neanderthals dance around a fire
To reenact my adolescence?
Could mystic voodoo shaman
Cure my lack of agency?
Or did lost American tribesmen
Prophesize the complexities of my love?
I can feel all these ************* looking up at me from the ground
And it's just me
As I accidentally burn my notebook with a cigarette
May 29, 2017
May 29, 2017 at 12:01 AM UTC
This is not about you.
This is not about
the transmutation
of your jail celled mind
wrapped in self-help
and cellophane.
This is not about
your new found
discovery
discovering me
and my afflictions
according to the
white man’s diction
a dictation
of my past
extracted
and examined
under the microscopic
power of time.
This is not about
your self-defined
enlightenment
when you made
a deal to unearth
the truth of HeLa
coated in dust
covered particles
of HeLa
on your nightstand
and I laid
in a grave
unmarked.
This is not about
my big lips
and thick hips
under ***** covers
running a sweat
fever on my thighs
shaking feet in stirrups
and the pain was rich
after a tight pinch
and I didn’t know
what part of me
had been snipped
to grow cold
and never die.
No, this is not about you.
This is about me.
A historic legacy
left to thrive across the time
less chains of nucleic
tidal waves
Covalent bonds
could never rival
the strides of this soul
miles beyond
the distant
COLORED ENTRANCE
something brewing
inside dividing
inexplicable replication,
readying for harvest
behind a dried tobacco field
Jan 3, 2012
Jan 3, 2012 at 3:21 AM UTC
The thousandth
****** beneath
Lake Baikal of
The Trident
The gods' mouthful
bristling iron
is spat ashore
Leviathan's bones
glint and crackle
Man is one celled
Apocalypse
yet to divide
His name in Manganese
splinters under the paths
of the mastodon
Dec 9, 2011
Dec 9, 2011 at 5:58 AM UTC
caveat! —bursting out as the fuse fetters away
wafting t'ward oil spills, tranquilized guns
with pace maker minds
and time to ****
sickle celled, graving shores
plead to crawl underground
through cascading bile and sedatives
that sift through these negatives
like bangled thieves
who crawl on broken knees
and lie idle under haunted bridges.
bouldered bones intertwine
or veins cut along a dotted line
caveat! cries the sayer's sooth,
for he says it scours and devours—
the slinking nightmare sleuth.
the tar is interrupted in carved equinoxes
soak in the crippled toxins
as the air becomes as thick as theophany
and tharm like grease in blood that take me in,
through ash and mud and
all the spider webs caving in
like delicate gorges forges beneath
nightmare sleuth reaching zenith
caveat, silhouettes
stretched out like oil in water
and this silicon tomb can hold me no longer
for i must break out before i am a goner
because it's a mistake that i'll never shake
your face turns opaque
and there was nothing in your eyes
but dripping flesh
wring out all your words for me
your jeers and your juries
but go cling to your crutch
your kings and your qualms
and the church that burns
in its hallow vacancy
for none can resist the urge
that thieves its delinquents from catatonic catacombs
and quagmire junctions
where the swamp will **** you in
and festering sweat sticks like guilt to your skin
and hell is a nightclub where every loss is a life
and heaven's a daydream with your neck to the knife
it needs no rhyme or reason
and every slip of your broken lip
just lose your grip and give in to the treason
would you rather burn at the stake
than suffer your cement heart break
with no reason or rhyme
it's just the weight of the season
backdrop collapse
railroads unfolding
and like a cell storm the train
is coming your way
and slinks away like a nightmare sleuth
it just takes one swipe of the claw
or one bite of the tooth
and it drags you in
feel the sidewalk sleeping
and the blinking lights creeping
above the overpass
and the cold wind reeling--
it'll be your last.
Nov 18, 2012
Nov 18, 2012 at 6:36 PM UTC
Parsimony Antipathy or Prudent Hostility
Locked-up Cuspid Of the One Celled Organism
As the Augury tends to its Auspices oddities
One Weak Ordeal and your reward will be handsome
Ceteris paribus when Ockham’s blade gets dull
Get a loan from your Karma or come back as amoebae
Hearts won’t be practical until they’re unbreakable.
But if you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.
Sometime this week I’ll hang from the gallows
Every drip of the tallow brings closer the end
But I’ve got this imp secured in this bottle
And you can have him for a price less than a penny
Yeah, I’ve got a genie who’ll grant all your wishes
Just pay for this bottle and your family gets fed
But act fast, for soon I **** my last twitches
By this time tomorrow I could very well be dead
Salivating tadpoles for Hegemony crickets
All imprisoned here with this repressionist peasant
By a singular stroke into Jove’s black booklet
Lucidly errant, who hasn’t been flippant?
Clever Arachne, my love, oh thou immodest spider
All I ever wanted, she picked a fine time to leave us
My days squandered eavesdropping Apocalypse riders
But if you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.
Sometime this week I’ll hang from the gallows
Every drip of the tallow brings closer the end
But I’ve got this imp secured in this bottle
And you can have him for a price less than a penny
Yeah, I’ve got a genie who’ll grant all your wishes
Just pay for this bottle and your family gets fed
But act fast, for soon I **** my last twitches
By this time tomorrow I could very well be dead
Jan 2, 2013
Jan 2, 2013 at 11:29 AM UTC
The question as humans we frequently ask,
Is where do our thoughts and memories,
Our energy,
That we've labeled as our soul,
Where do they go when our body is still,
Mute and lifeless?
Very few contemplate with much dedication on the religious viewpoint the question of,
Where did we come from?
Sure.
Someone might say that we evolved from single celled microorganisms.
Another might say that we came from the dust and that our soul is Gods breath thriving inside.
They take one of those answers or neither and go with it.
I see our bodies as a mathematical equation.
God being X
All things living being equal to Y.
The equation doesn't line up with X being the only factor to equal Y,
If so humans would be equal to God,
Which we are not.
The question is, what's the other variable?
The part that somehow takes energy jumping between the organic wiring in our brains,
To make a single human being.
Jul 8, 2014
Jul 8, 2014 at 12:22 PM UTC
In the beginning was the three-pointed star,
One smile of light across the empty face,
One bough of bone across the rooting air,
The substance forked that marrowed the first sun,
And, burning ciphers on the round of space,
Heaven and hell mixed as they spun.
In the beginning was the pale signature,
Three-syllabled and starry as the smile,
And after came the imprints on the water,
Stamp of the minted face upon the moon;
The blood that touched the crosstree and the grail
Touched the first cloud and left a sign.
In the beginning was the mounting fire
That set alight the weathers from a spark,
A three-eyed, red-eyed spark, blunt as a flower,
Life rose and spouted from the rolling seas,
Burst in the roots, pumped from the earth and rock
The secret oils that drive the grass.
In the beginning was the word, the word
That from the solid bases of the light
Abstracted all the letters of the void;
And from the cloudy bases of the breath
The word flowed up, translating to the heart
First characters of birth and death.
In the beginning was the secret brain.
The brain was celled and soldered in the thought
Before the pitch was forking to a sun;
Before the veins were shaking in their sieve,
Blood shot and scattered to the winds of light
The ribbed original of love.
1.7k
This is my first poem,
I have no clue what to write,
But I will try.
I'm having my first child,
How will I provide for and nurture a life?
I have never been here before,
This is my first time.
There used to be a time,
When time didn't matter
To a multi-celled mass.
This is my last poem,
I still have no clue what to write,
But it will be easier this time for me.
This time around my eldest child
Must provide for and nurture a life.
I've been here many times before,
But this is my last time.
There was never a time
When time mattered to a multi-celled mass.
This is the first and last poem.
Originally written 4/26/11
Revised 10/16/14
(c) 2014 Brandon Antonio Smith
Oct 16, 2014
Oct 16, 2014 at 6:37 PM UTC
walking through, a rain shower,
that hangs in the air,
refreshing wash in waves power
past the umbrella
held overhead, trapping droplets
about the head and face
dampness that chases
any warmth from
your clothes and skin
and now the fabric
soaks it in
holds fast
past your shoulders
to those knees
and feet
while you become
a single celled life
form which holds
water like a sponge.
Sponge.
©DWE082013
Aug 4, 2013
Aug 4, 2013 at 1:51 AM UTC
These empty eyes are being drained
By this evolution of culture
Reversing back to one-celled creatures
Front row seat to the never ending horror feature
The white ones get stripped bare
The black are killed and disposed of
Like the were never here
Make the same mistakes
Over and over again
Then your fear rapes
But you're so willing to slip it in
You drop down onto your submissive knees
Spew out ******** apologies
Your permissive mind leaves you vulnerable
Anything but invincible
Dream of a heaven so high in the sky
Dying to get there
Living in sin, don't wanna try to get out of the grave you dug
Of this Hell hole of despair
Dec 5, 2010
Dec 5, 2010 at 7:58 AM UTC
Supposedly beauty is in the eye of the beholder
Which is super gay
So when I say you are beautiful
This is what I mean
You are beautiful in the same way
That the word, “believe” in sign language
Can translate to being married to your own thoughts
When a person sees something beautiful
Their pupils can increase up to 45 percent in size
I’m not high today I swear
Just that
You surprise me every time
Your left lung is smaller than your right
So it can make room for your heart
That’s just biology
And when they say that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach
When people blush
Their stomach lining turns red too
Laughing lowers stress
A 7 year old can laugh almost six hundred times in one day
An adult
13 to 100
I want to make you laugh like we are 7 again
I was 7 once
I’ve had seventeen years practice since then
When you put a shell to your ear
What you are really hearing is the sound of your own blood
Rushing through your ears
There is a ******* ocean inside of you
That swells like lungs
And rushes a steady current of mostly
Unattractive creatures
You are like the bottom of the sea
All single celled and fight for life
In darkness
And maybe that doesn’t seem too beautiful
But you don’t really know what’s down there
Do you?
You are beautiful like old people
Who think you are sweet
Because you’ve had enough patience
To match their pace
“I don’t know when I got old” she said
“But I wasn’t ready. It took me ten years to figure this place out.
“I’m 94. I don’t have another ten.”
And she kissed me
Beautiful like poetry
When poetry hurts the most
When it gives you goose-bumps
And I bet if I stuck my arm inside a music box
To let my chilled skin pluck the metal keys inside
There wouldn’t be music
I am too soft
And it would hurt
But it looks like if I were hard enough
There might be
It would sound like chaos
The keys are beautiful
But the sound inconsistent
Beautiful
Like the collaboration of molecules
That understood pointillism enough to make me
But still experimental
So they gave me cancer
And I’m shorter than I want to be
And I am pretty sure they are laughing
About what they did to my brain
But my lungs are perfectly uneven
So my heart can pump oceans
So I can move and be stupid
And do things like tell you
You are ******* beautiful
Dec 11, 2012
Dec 11, 2012 at 4:58 PM UTC
Find me in the shadows
Cowering behind broken windows
Obsolete and useless
Like old Nintendos
Single celled amongst the minnows
Fear the stage, cancel shows
Tattered armor from the battles
When oh when
Will I get to chalk up my first win?
Who knows
I mean
Who knows?
Been trading blows
With good and evils
Gods and devil's
A perpetual looser revels
With a fat lip and broken nose
I lie about it so it still grows
As time slows
Behind a cold wind that blows
New highs
New lows
No,
Reoccurring lows
Kept on stepped on toes
A blade allows me to watch
Oxygen turn life from blue to red
As it flows
And drips off the edge
Of pointy elbows
Not caring where it goes
Never telling what it knows
©2025
Jan 10, 2025
Jan 10, 2025 at 3:53 PM UTC
This misery is eating us alive
Blame me for not letting you breathe
That’s all you do, hate is pushing us to survive
In the darkness, through the blind eye
Judging faults and mistakes, giving into the lies
Oh this night is making me insane,
The rough *** and the neck bites
The blood and broken bones
We are messed in every way, grinning in the realness of suicide
Hate me, hurt me, love me, you are mine
Celled in this asylum, to a realization that maybe you like it
This relationship that is chaining us
Red blooded and breathless,
You scream my name in this endless desire
We burn but still strive through this fire
May 7, 2013
May 7, 2013 at 10:53 AM UTC
I believe in cooperation
and I achieve it all the time
mainly by staying solitary.
Oct 25, 2016
Oct 25, 2016 at 8:50 AM UTC
-I mean, it feels good to daydream,
and have that in a quiet room,
with the rain falling over next to you,
feeling the droplets on your warm skin ..
- There's something about water
that really makes us feel more alive
at its touch.. and the sound and smell
of rain bring us deeper into that
perfect state of daydreaming..
-Because it reminds us of a forgotten ancient time.
When we were single-celled organisms,
swimming in the water,
living and breathing it.
Although, humans don't have a direct memory of it,
the collective consciousness have a distinct, indirect
memory of that experience.
More like muscle memory, I suppose..
This especially is what is providing us with quite a good, peaceful feeling of being in close touch with Nature and Water.
It reminds us of home..
-That's beautiful.
Jun 28, 2021
Jun 28, 2021 at 7:17 AM UTC
”in tears, may make other organs weep”
HenryMaudsley, 19th-century English psychiatrist”
<>
make no mistake,
the essaence of
Sorrow
is everywhere:
within the blood streaming,
in each celled nucleus
it etched, microscopic,
to the tear ducts directly connected,
a microbiome insertion everything
so when love torn,
deserted,
merely mentally homeless,
no direction selected,
the weeping originates in
every limb and *****
though no pain sensation need be present
or available to be nominated or accounted,
the tears can’t be closed off,
the torrential hurricane unceasing,
and through it comes with a wisp of a
smile attached,
for the flooding in a mirror
now gleaming reflected
and at longingly last,
a true portrait
saved,
*for a sorrow vented
is a sorrow
freed
and
a profile
completed
Dec 1, 2024
Dec 1, 2024 at 12:23 PM UTC
For Marshall Gebbie
*in June, with sun dispatched to somewhere else,
a steaming mug, adds to the clouds of gloom but,
dissipates the summer chill, that seems colder than its
winter chill counterpart, since it is contraindicated,
here, where, it’s summer and everybody’s inside, hiding,
for all the irrational reasons, the news, reports so earnestly
you send me a poem of incautious beauty, of a moment re-warmed,
desire, recalled, rekindling a past so well remembered that it edges
me off that chill, and I wonder how timing is in always everything,
the rear view mirror concept somehow a predictive tool,
cause we never saw it all, but just right, plenty enough, and
when old men muse, the risk of self- ruse is always lurking about
remembering how it was, how we wanted it to be, how we’re
sure that we too were there, or at least near, almost certainly,
was it a thousand poems ago, or B.P, (before poetry), when
actions were louder, preferable to words, life, charging neurons,
by the billions, so we have those storages, celled memories,
so that the poems of then, come back so easily, framed in our memory,*
in the glorious, stunning heated colorings of pleasure
June 5,
2:35pm
Shelter Island
Jun 5, 2020
Jun 5, 2020 at 4:35 PM UTC
long faded echoes
dance and congeal
smooth canyon walls
hold memories like agate
molten basalt cooled
faces hide beneath stone
abstract images of yesteryear
geyser from unseen depths
microscopic bacteria
slip betwixt crevasse
depositing refuse
giving flora a foothold
multi celled seedlings sprout
jutting forth with sprigs of green
instantly photosynthesizing
oxygen creators
new organisms take the fauna
making it home for both species
invertebrates
and those with a backbone
they exhale life
frontal lobe and thumbs
humanity as product
plague and virus
drinking the lifeblood
challenging the ecosystem
planetary shift
earth groans with growing pains
food chain emperor
next to extinction
a great cleansing
is at hand /
Sep 8, 2016
Sep 8, 2016 at 3:47 PM UTC
I miss heaven
then I think about what its for...
then I'm watching mucus being influenced by dust,
spit celled by detritus on a dry road,
a fast dehydrating route between two towns I didn't/don't want to stop in.
I know the drunkenness of disbelief:
i) bouncing off objects;
ii) trying and failing to move a weight;
iii) reasoning to a crash test dummy;
iv) eating a small portion from an edible bowl;
v) knocking up jokes to the disdain of mutes.
I don't know what it would have been like to have never heard,
when any words strained me into a pretending that pride could later march into the courts.
I couldn't care about tomorrow when I am as convinced as any other resistance-of-the-past,
nothing so heroic as martyr, just a bad advertisement for tough meat .
this isn't me,
of course,
I am some nothing,
narrating,
cool breezes don't remain effectual for my eternity,
but this might be a story worth acting in,
one where my laugh falls from my skull into my stomach,
one where I finally see myself die, if not because I'm an interesting character, but because I made the transition into one: somewhat plausibly.
one where the audience had left or never arrived and I was shouting so loudly I hadn't been informed.
Jul 29, 2013
Jul 29, 2013 at 10:25 PM UTC
For the petson who gave me these words
<>
Love is:
*A multi celled organism, roughly round,
but not of necessity circular,
(circular love, easily shift shapes. BE wary)
It is, both fluid and rock hard concrete,
Overly defined and/or a deconstructed aerie breeze,
unmeasurable, immeasurable,
Except for the speed of its
Arrival
and the
hurricane of its
Departure,
Unseen and the Unsound,
so soon disappeared
Surely it is sensory, for I have witnessed,
this L0VE notional I have
seen, tasted,
heard, envisioned
even actually
felt
And yet,
a grown poet shed tears,
Upon completion of a love poem,
And recipient of said poem weeps without term
getting through another day.
and the day after.,
but precision counts,*
It is the
knot of not,
the tied up exhaustion of the absence thereof,
the dulling that that hopefully
takes the edge off the blade,
but does
not,
Erased when open eyes & declare awake,
for
the duller the day gets,
the more the blade cuts ragged deeper,
its horrific edge
scratches like broken nails,
bite like jagged teeth
Stars ***** you deep,
Hugs squeeze your breath out, away,
Dreams disappear, the sweet taste, retained,
fain but faint on the edges of the tongue,
blurry but there,
silently reverberating,
and the memory of the sensation is never entirely erased,
but
getting through the day,
'tis sufficient,
even adequate
for the love of hope
the love of love,
no matter what you deny,
is the tablet swallowed unconsciously,
so getting through to the next day
is the unlocking key
Jul 14, 2025
Jul 14, 2025 at 5:44 PM UTC
Crouched in viewing the shivering cobweb
craftily spanning a waterfall's edge
I saw fine precision-knifed filaments
cunningly strung with infinite wisdom.
A weightless weapon of swinging steel,
death-celled bed spun on gossamer wheel.
That devilish duvet of glistening gauze
betokened real craft as the spider paused
then in obscurity tensed for success,
alert with magnetic insect suppression.
Hairily silent as tensile wires, cleverly glued
met miniscule life of wriggling food
that by moving caught death in but seconds
while spider gave fly lethal injections.
As water's curtain cascaded to ground
and whirling catch-trap spun victim around
fed spider wiped mouth, cleaned sticky legs,
repaired any holes and prepared for the next.
Mar 15, 2017
Mar 15, 2017 at 6:35 AM UTC