"mitochondria" poems
I am hungry
and it is reflected
in the contours
of every inch
of skin
every cell a-flutter
tiny wings and heartbeats
activated within
right down to
the ribosomes and
kidney-shaped
mitochondria
right up through epidermis
woven as threads
of softness penetrating
your inner hard, dark parts
causing them
to melt into
my light
I am craving
to feel your
absolute heart's
raging core
my aching flesh burning,
my heart, wrapped in
a love
so pure
My need to be
devoured surfaces
in smoothness,
at a glance
You feel it acutely,
no room for doubt
or subtle chance
I am ravenous
for muscle-worked arms
(arms that could easily
try to break)
to be supremely
gentle as you part
my thighs like the ocean
and sacredly partake
the slickness of your tongue
in my feminine grace
the stains of my love
drenching
your noble face
your eyes on mine
as I sharply breathe
need to hold your
head stroke your
hair know that for me
the king takes off that
garland of gold
breaking free of
all symbols of status
the only real treasure
the queen who
gives to him,
and who he now pleasures
and I let myself be consumed
with the reverence
of a psalm
my love pouring into you
healing your hurts,
like a balm
in this private landscape
we are the most
ferocious of tender
estuaries
in an eternal vista
in this hour of somewhere,
the sea hauls us in
like ancient creatures,
bringing the fossils
back to life
in lustrous foam
as they
inch their way
into the spirals
that we
feel we could
call
home
May 21, 2016
May 21, 2016 at 12:57 PM UTC
There is a vast Ocean we call the Universe. In it are Galaxies like Plankton. Within them are Stars Systems like Cells. The Stars themselves are like Nuclei, are surrounded by Planets like Ribosomes, Vesicle, Rough and Smooth endoplasmic reticulum, Golgi apparatus, Cytoskeleton, Mitochondria, Vacuole, Cytosol, Lysosome, Centrioles within Centrosome. And sometimes in the planets are Civilizations like Atoms. Within these civilizations are People, some Positive like Protons, some Negative like Electrons, and some who just don't give a **** just like Neutrons. Making every single thing an Important (but Not Better than the other) part of the Whole System.
Oct 24, 2013
Oct 24, 2013 at 9:56 PM UTC
Thousands of years I have lived
And now I feel like little bacteria
My heart is filled with pores
And people call it ostia
The night's are glazing with pleurobranchia
And thank God I didn't get ******* hemiplegia
Solitary I feel in my animal kingdom
I wish I could do something with my boredom.
How amazing are these euplectellian shrimps
Dieing together imprisoned
Symptoms of true love they show to me
Together up to death they are known to be.
Maybe I am the class imperfecta
But by birth I am a mammalia
I wish we could both be mycorrhiza
And get hallucinated with amanita.
Someday we would make a synapse
And get into the love with mitochondria
And there our nervous system stops
And there the impulse will walk .
No special organelles I have
I'm just 70s ribosome
My heart is incipient
With foldings of mesosome
Jun 12, 2015
Jun 12, 2015 at 4:41 AM UTC
A fleshy thing—
warm blood and organs
and cells and appendages
and mitochondria with cells
who have cells who have cells.
The introduction of a touch—
a soft, palpable meeting—
moved me and made me.
A union of dissimilar atoms
is moved as the object nears the skin.
And when the two meet, to tell
what happens next is to tell
of the long history
between one thing and another.
A fleshy thing—
warm blood and organs
and something else too:
many dissimilar atoms
that could laugh and play with you.
Apr 19, 2013
Apr 19, 2013 at 9:58 AM UTC
Mitochondria generating the necessary energy
to graze my fingertips across your zygomatic arch.
Feeling your breath quicken to almost hyperventilation
as desire fills your eyes. Blood pounding through your heart
containing red cells, white cells, fibrin, plasma, life-giving oxygen.
I brush hair behind your ear and feel a quadrigeminal leap
in the need to hold you close.
Feb 7, 2011
Feb 7, 2011 at 6:26 AM UTC
Outside the miner's shack Joshua trees stand silent vigil,
expecting his imminent return, or perhaps his ghost.
Horn silver, weathered by rainwater from volcanic rock,
no longer strews fallow ground to lure the miner back.
In lieu, small succulents feed tortoise and jackrabbit,
replace the metal which only men could value.
Nevada gains a confluence of life in the exchange,
dry-lake flora and fauna bartered for chlorargyrite.
Barren mountains surround this desolation,
where nothing more than fungi lie in vapid dissipation
before the relentless punishment of the sun,
a lattice-work of valleys dissecting their *****
I ventured here to purge my body of poisons,
exhale the vapors and biles of city living,
to rid the alien presence in my mitochondria,
and let it go the way of Silver State.
Feb 19, 2012
Feb 19, 2012 at 11:58 PM UTC
Snail trail leading from mouth to heinous ****
let slugs undulate their way across my listerine lips
old jokes like S-Car-Go
and stuff inside me more variable and insuppressible
similar to Inspector Gadget
Matthew Broderick was my mentor
as a child
I am not in pampers any longer
4 P's of teens
***** petrol party and paycheck
that doesn't include pampers
I used to wade in my own ****
that's ******* disgusting to think about now
now an adult
still just wasting time
and wading through my own ****
Aug 1, 2013
Aug 1, 2013 at 2:17 PM UTC
inside me are organs
inside my cells are organelles
inside me are organelles
they are mine
they are me
they are composed of atoms
they are composed of protons, neutrons, electrons
protons are mine
they are me
neutrons are mine
they are me
electrons are mine
they too are me
electrons and mitochondria and kidneys
are me
I am me
bone comprises skeleton
marrow comprises bone
bone and skeleton are me
marrow too is me
I feel this in my self
I feel this in my bones
bone feels this in my marrow
bone and I share marrow
Nov 27, 2016
Nov 27, 2016 at 4:23 PM UTC
now that territory outweighs tolerance,
we all just march in search of conquest,
for it is this that we were born to do.
no one questions this so called 'truth,'
we just read outdated books and call them proof.
for the right to destroy, we'll accept any view.
give me this and give me that
and put the rest up on a rack
on the off chance i run out of things to consume.
we're getting bloated and overfed
but that still doesn't leave any time to rest
because this isn't enough, and i need a bigger room.
so i'll just take yours and when i'm done, i'll take his,
and what i can't take, i'll drown in my **** . . .
no matter what, it will all be marked as mine.
and when the devil takes us up to show what we could have,
we'll say, 'we fooled you! we took all we could nab.
you've got nothing to offer us, so get in the ******* line,
like everyone else we've got tagging along,
weeping and praying, singing spiritual songs,
and waiting for us to throw them a bone.'
because everyone knows territory outweighs tolerance . . .
it's easy to believe if you have no conscience,
and you're willing to spend your life in your mind, alone.
so that's what we do: march about and consume
and destroy and defile and declare it as truth,
and ignore anything that points to something else.
because where ever we go there is never peace,
we just breed violence like a ******* disease
and pretend there is no such thing as a Self.
because like mitochondria, we're ensuring growth
and what's it to us if we leave dashed hopes
trailing behind in our wake?
get in the line, or lay down and die,
but whatever was yours now is called mine,
and i'm already looking for something else to take.
Apr 29, 2012
Apr 29, 2012 at 10:54 PM UTC
#The Battleground Beneath Her Skin
(A Physiology of Light and War)
Before it reaches her;
even before her breath draws it in,
I break myself down..
not as surrender,
but as choice.
Each particle stripped bare,
each atom exhaled
made clean by the reckoning
of my own dark,
infused with the stubborn
weight of light
earned, not borrowed.
Within the responsibility of what
leaves me,
I enter the quiet union—
the kneeling choice
to align with the hand of God,
to let even my smallest fragments
carry His capacity to heal.
Every airborne particle,
accountable,
deliberate,
refined enough
to cross the distance,
to enter her
without deception.
Beneath her skin,
a war unfolds.
It is not loud,
not made of swords,
but of smaller things..
things unseen by eyes,
but never missed by the marrow,
the blood,
the quiet trembling of cells
that have known both wound
and wonder.
Light and dark..
not in theory,
but in matter
thread themselves through every atom,
every strand of her being.
Not metaphor,
but measurable:
*the way shadows lean into the soft chambers of her lungs,
the way light, when chosen,
can rewrite the blueprints etched into the bloodstream.*
This is the battleground..
her body,
her breath,
her most involuntary places.
Where no poetry of
seductive manipulation..
no whispered counterfeit
can cover what is real.
Only substance speaks here.
Only intent.
Only what survives the fire of accountability
earns the right to stay.
The particles come;
stripped down,
atomized,
refined.. not by accident,
but by the slow, steady grind
of volition.
They enter her;
through breath,
through pores..
*through the quiet, relentless openness
that even fear cannot close completely.*
And inside--
the war begins.
.. .. .. ..
Mitochondria spark—
tiny engines deciding
what stays,
what burns away.
Capillaries widen,
rivers branching through her like
tributaries
willing to carry
what is real,
what is earned,
what is Light.
The counterfeit falters here.
Pretty words mean nothing
to oxygen.
False portraits
dissolve beneath the chemistry of truth.
The cells remember;
they choose.
And as the Light infuses
the quietest corners of her..
her thighs, her hips,
the soft stretch of her waist;
there is no seduction,
no trickery.
Only the hard-won intimacy
of substance made pure.
Not by the blending of oils,
not by the friction of skin,
but by the deeper,
unseen alchemy
of what enters,
what lingers,
what refuses to bow
to darkness.
The battleground is hers now.
And though the shadows will not
yield easily,
they cannot claim her;
not where light
has been chosen,
earned,
metabolized.
The war is not over,
but benea.th her skin,
within her blood,
*Light has begun
to rise.*
#
Jun 28, 2025
Jun 28, 2025 at 11:54 AM UTC
When you boil it down,
really get down to the flesh,
bone;
marrow;
mitochondria;
I am nothing but a fizzled
thing
pushing
third-rate
pulses
out of a fourth-rate heart;
that's why when I ***** you to me
in an impermanent cowgirl;
chest
to
chest;
a good, running thump
is answered
by a
descending blip.
Jan 18, 2012
Jan 18, 2012 at 9:50 PM UTC
blank stare
balancing on spinal columns
tripwire produced by mitochondria
four million breaks
i have the answers to the world carved into my torso
Oct 2, 2013
Oct 2, 2013 at 2:04 PM UTC
You are amazing.
You are more than the pain
More than the loneliness
More than the desperation.
You are more than their looks
More than their stares
More than Autism, Mitochondria Disease,
More than the seizures.
You are you
Which is enough.
May 13, 2015
May 13, 2015 at 12:40 PM UTC
Goodnight anthropocentrism—
Mitochondria swim in your stardust
But Contraverse awakens on the
Frontiers of the Valerian Kingdom
At the gnarled staff of the Oil Sage
Taking root between the Earth’s furrows
Springing forth fountains of sweetest Nard
The Jewel of Jatamansi emerges glistening green
In it the eye of the beholder finds the
Seeds of a once forbidden dream
Germinating in the juices of this Gem
Out of it the silent roar of a thousand fields pressing
Aromatic oceans through bursting buds
Of Lavender pagodas rapturously trumpeting forth
Framed by stacks of soft sweet musky Sage
Broad and leathery like elephant’s ears
Curtained with a soft cascade of Orange blossom snow
The sweet kiss of Neroli on your brow
Imbibing the senses with paralyzing pungency
Tangling tendrils to heartstrings
And pulling us beneath Rosewater pools
Floating breathlessly ensconced in a dream
Primordial songs whispering wordlessly,
“Wake whenever you’re ready . . .”
Dec 6, 2014
Dec 6, 2014 at 5:11 PM UTC
We were states of matter
until we had chemistry
a pure of mix elements causing eradication
and more like atomic radiation
we were powerful
an affective pair
then biology taught me
to value every heart beat of yours
every tissue to cells
every cytoplasm to mitochondria
and that Czechoslovakia
that you were from
had a capital named Prague
during world history
but nothing interesting than your story
during our midnight phone call
then mathematics taught me to calculate the distance between us
and physics showed me our chance of collision in every single velocity
I have used all kinds of formulas I learnt to solve our problem
but dear
I got the answer of
good bye
Good bye,
High School.
Feb 9, 2016
Feb 9, 2016 at 7:32 AM UTC
Cell phone shield in hand,
the mirror-me peers
into a shoddy, cracked up
dream reflector-slash-protector
as I make amends with
my agitated mitochondria and
attempt to drill miniscule holes into
paper dolls without ripping them.
So screams the wall hanging!
Banshees dance, falling
into cyclical romances as
cream colored microphones peek
out around one-way windows wondering
whether or not the smiles will hold.
Eyes still,
eyes wrinkles crinkling,
spit spray sprinkling.
Connect to the dreamers.
Push your plug into
my cracking wall sockets,
pull me apart at the seams.
So cries the doorstopper!
Knees bleed from
street corner séances
and eyes green grass
that's afraid to ask
where its clover went
but heavens, it's bent for hell.
Pray tell me, burping chickadee,
when did your teeth glass over
with a film of cerulean and
your bones start sailing
through tepid reminders that
you may end this life a failure,
swallowing Uncle Ben's rice packet trash
at the dark black bottom of the Pacific?
So sighs the statue!
Broken walkie talkies
feed red back to nothing
and knick knack hoarders note
the familiar festering of deadly bacteria
in the lungs and on the
tippy top of the tongue.
Space cadets rocket
through concrete jungles containing
apartment after
apartment after
apartment filled with
mannequins filled with
sand filled with
unevenly severed hands.
So speaks the ornament!
So declares the dashboard decal!
Sensual scholarly seekers
seem so totally hip
and read feminist poetry
to dispel the myths
and spit on the irony.
I won't dare to flatter you
with the focused attention of stone
or allow the personable picture frame
to make the secrets of
the microscopic universe known.
So suggests the ship siren!
So recites the repository!
Empty yourself into me,
adopt a new philosophy,
abandon in within two weeks
so I can see and you can seep,
your fluttering robin heart to keep
and glaciers to arrive upon
a salty brown eternal sleep.
Deliver me to the melting shopping mall!
The centennial fire alarm goes off
at the tip of the cliff,
at the end of the hall.
Aug 24, 2014
Aug 24, 2014 at 3:28 PM UTC
How would you take the news of my bitter insomnia?
Would you feel conflicted knowing that could I sleep,
I might not still want you? I know that you’re just a heap
Of atoms tied together, cells powered with mitochondria,
And without you I am just succumbing to hypoxia.
You are nothing to the universe, just an ignorant sheep,
And were my head unclouded, no illusions would I keep:
I’d know in lucidity it’s just my acute monophobia.
But you are there still, hiding under my thin skin,
And you’re not going away, and it’s driving me insane.
How could I discount your memory, your incredible smiles,
Your hands rough like heartbeats, your eyes glowing like sin?
You are a heap of molecules, mere bone and membrane:
And your soul is a fire, your ardor drives me for miles.
Dec 9, 2013
Dec 9, 2013 at 4:48 PM UTC
Yesterday, I turned twenty-one.
I was born in July, but I can smell the holly of winter
and graduation is a block away.
Two months ago, I was sixteen,
trying to figure out high school and imagining
the person I was going to be.
Twenty years ago, I was ten,
boxing up my life and meeting friends who took basketball
just as serious.
Once upon a time, I was six.
As biology dictates, at some point I was even younger
But time is a dream I cannot grasp
I am not the same person I was then
as I am not the same person I was five minutes ago
if only due to the way my actin slides
and the way my mitochondria only carry
my mother’s DNA.
Slow and passive,
that’s evolution, not revolution.
I still feel like an ant
with a barrel of gasoline
waiting for a spark to set it
ablaze.
Dec 9, 2012
Dec 9, 2012 at 8:48 PM UTC
I want to become a diver
like the scuba guys in the Thai cave
risking death to save life,
going deeper into convoluted passages
of darkness to pull life from it.
I want to become a heart surgeon
transplanting energizing mitochondria
into babies’ dying hearts
to revive and save damaged cells.
Oh to receive from the gods of creativity
an infusion of fresh energy
into this old body
and renew flagging cells
with a flowering fragrance
as sweet and unique as Plumeria!
May this diving deeper
be as fruitful now as it has been
in the decisive moments
I was able to conquer pride and self
to reach out to others
whose spirits had frowns
whose life energy was down.
I know: thinking, reading and writing
are not quite enough to reach and taste
the fruits of angels.
Like the classic tension
between “faith and works”
“deeper” means a marriage
of information and application
to get transformation.
And so these moments of writing poems
and diving deeper, rising higher
for the creative spirit
are not divorced
from kindness and reaching out
in friendship, intimacy, and love,
from taking time and spending energy
beyond these meditative walls
embracing life where it calls.
I am a diver and a surgeon
a spark striker, a flame keeper
always desiring
to move
deeper, deeper, deeper.
Jul 12, 2018
Jul 12, 2018 at 9:12 AM UTC
the factory workers of my prefrontal cortex
are on a raucous strike because,
the train chugging them to lunch breaks at my amygdala
has been broken down for days.
and the now strained relay of packets of faxes from this neuron
to the one all the way south on Abbey Lane,
is creating untold pressure for Wernicke -
so forgive me if i ask you to rephrase.
despite the absent hoarded salivating mouths,
the deli in my amygdala keeps on producing
thousands of ******* italian subs,
so now the place floods with grease-sweat from old meat
that would make a carnivore remit...
and it's seeping, leaking poison to Broca,
who is now refusing to explain herself
to the confused face projected on my retina's blurred screen.
the mitochondria housed in my somatasensory
are all comatose from last night's debauchery.
so everything is still,
numb to the touch
blank on the face
dead in the eyes -
unaware of the incessant twitching
that's rolling through my joints, muscles, skin, sore red thighs.
every nucleus of every cell
restarting again, again, again,
but rebooting isn't clearing the glitch in the system.
so just lie here with me,
broken machine to broken machine -
our hearts still glisten.
Nov 20, 2014
Nov 20, 2014 at 10:28 AM UTC
soothe the mitochondria back into function
prove your worth
show us what a thousand years worth of natural selection can do
make the animals angry by replacing their medicine with salt
they are animals after all
they should be made to delicately pry it from under your fingernails
we don't do funerals around here
we don't wear black clothes around here
we don't eat three square meals a day around here
we don't get between six to eight hours of sleep every week night around here
pry my ******* teeth out with dental floss and a hammer
remembering only to wash your hands first
because all of your temporary muses have died
and you have nothing better to do
Sep 24, 2013
Sep 24, 2013 at 10:47 PM UTC
More and more I have come to admire resilience.
Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam
returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous
tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side,
it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true.
But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers,
mitochondria, figs–all this resinous, unretractable earth.
May 15, 2015
May 15, 2015 at 9:24 PM UTC
brother masturbates with an almost invisible dedication.
mother
yells
from the river
that all rain
is highway
robbery.
while reciting
proverbs
for mitochondria
I pass the time
wearing
my father’s
shoes
for the footsteps
in his head.
Apr 14, 2015
Apr 14, 2015 at 6:55 PM UTC
The rebirth of our nation
rests in motion.
In a country mounted
on revolutionary (Freedom of) Speech
fear of falling off the balance beam
permeates our culture's streets
Rock bottom is visible.
The next step in a row of stones
might require more than a skip
but the heavy heart of resiliency
must persist,
preserve the embers that
burn in the enduring hand
of our Statue (of Liberty).
Cope with the wilted white flowers
Look to the rising sun
every morning it emerges with
tired eyes, sleeping flames,
garden beds greeted with mist.
Listen to the music of mighty mitochondria
Let the DNA of "bend don't break"
and swords of endorphins thrive
'til their final breath.
Fight unmerited power
with a rigid, rebellious fist
and a voice armed to the teeth
from the mouth it speaks.
Fight 'til the white of bone
and then some.
This is the long anticipated
wake-up call from Mother Gaia;
it comes in the form of tears.
Don't let them drown us,
create new
streams, rivers, lakes, and oceans
so they wave with every
spun cycle
of Earth's journey
around the sun
of a
Nov 9, 2016
Nov 9, 2016 at 5:01 PM UTC