What they don’t tell you in school,
while you’re trying to remember
the difference between prophase and metaphase
chromosomes and chromatin
is that really
biology isn’t science
biology is life


See, divorce
divorce is like mitosis
slow to start, but quick to finish

Begins at prophase
when conflicts arise as your family’s nucleolus,
your family’s unity
disappears

Your carefree life, your chromatin,
coil and change
become tight, tense chromosomes

Outside forces, mitotic spindles,
residing in the cytoplasm
start creeping towards your parents
to separate their souls

Metaphase:
you’re all lined up
single file
ready for battle

Centrosomes, middles of each new life,
poised opposing each other
with their spindles latched onto you kinetochore, your middle,
like a dog with it’s leash

Anaphase:
everything separates,
your world’s torn apart
and you’re left silently
watching
alone
as your sister is torn from your life

Telophase:
the pain starts to lessen
as you uncoil
and your broken family’s nuclear membrane
begins to reform

Once the paper’s are signed
once the cell’s wall’s rebuilt
your old life is over
and the process
it’s finished

See, they don’t tell you
don’t think you need to know
that
divorce is simply biology
and
mitosis
well, it’s life

There was always at least five feet between us. It was actually a good thing in the preliminary stage. We could lock eyes without the urgent need to look away too soon. The intensity was containable in those five feet.

(speaks very fast) And then my stupid self went around and quickly covered four of those five feet. It is the laws of mitotic cell division god ******. You do not grow four feet in a day. You grow inch by inch, centimeter by centimeter. Ask him about that literature assignment. Shakespeare is responsible for excess glutton in today’s pick up lines. Wait for your friends to dare him to kiss you on a Truth and Dare. Wait for him to want to. Then, tell him, maybe, I like you.

That, in that one foot perimeter, I could see golden flakes in the circles of his eyes when clearly they are brown should have been the first sign that it was a bad idea. Five feet was our perimeter. Five feet was where we stopped. (points to own body) Five feet is where I stop.

For, I will never be anyone else but me. I will never experience, firsthand at least, what it is like to be a lanky six footer who hunches because she doesn't know what to do with her body. Or her exhilaration when she finds the basketball court. I will never experience being the Egyptian boy who has a chemistry counter in his kitchen, who asks his maid to buy him potassium nitrate. I won't know what it is like to be his maid who almost got arrested for asking to buy potassium nitrate (a component of explosives) in Egypt.  I shall never experience courting like the characters in a Jane Austen novel. And how nice it must feel, feeling beautiful.

And I will never ever experience, what it is like to be his girlfriend.

and what is there to fear
in the refuge of bedrock,
in the embrace of flaming
sword and iron shield,
in bronze hands that
cradled us when we
were but dust beneath
a night sky filled with
stars,
who spoke past the
rivulets of time to
forge seas from the
embers of dying stars
and unfurled entropy
into a flat sheet across
an ever expanding universe,
of a god who, looking at
angels with wings the
size of galaxies, sought
to make a home for
a host of insignificant
creations instead,
whose lives could be
measured out in grains
of sand, spooled in mitotic
spindles of telomeres,
fragile pieces of DNA
covered with the fingerprints
of divinity.

yesterday i chose love
but then it swung.

emerging
from
the throat
of grided
anthropos,

i found

a view
distant.

it skipped
over waters which
merely glinted
at first,

but then i
looked
out of
the corner
of my eye and

the water
swam

in the harbor.
it carved
out

a kind of
geometry; i felt
short little
liquid daggers
stop these
hard eyes:

sea birds
glide and
dip along
air currents, making
roundabout
hemispherics
and landing in the water
with this
grace that
was like
accurate
solemn
play; then they

would dive deep
to fish (?) i counted
46 seconds for one;
62 for another. i wondered
if they got anything,
or if they were just
trying to see how
far down
they could go..

the breeze
was cooled.
it felt so
right. and i
could feel - i mean -
actually ******* feel. and
the nuerons on
my mouth
spoke to
my head.

but then my
parabola
dropped and

retraced its
steps back
to the grids
of them,
the cut slab
of have.

ppl not
walking but
more like
falling on their
legs. feet rooting or
cutting deep into brick,
staring at thine
rectangle pocket entity,
vectoring
destinations
efficient, dressed
in their conquerer’s best,
layered up,
shiny and
brand new. it was

as if
their father’s
father’s
sword had
undergone mitotic
division and
whetted the face to

the
nines.

i could
smell
their fate.

it was
then that

i heard the
saprophytes
that will
eat me
call my
other name; the one
that i have long
shut-up in a box whose
label is unintelligible

i then
ate pizza
with
cheese and
pepperoni,
making
my
bed
for them

whether colliding as fast as particles smashing together for man's curiosity
or moving only as slow as the divisions of the most inactive mitotic cells
while there are stars at your fingertips
and entire galaxies dotting the vacuum of space that separate us
does anything even matter?

looking elsewhere for answers becomes futile
when there's only one certain truth:
the steady beat of life in the unpredictable environment of our universe
wouldn't exist if it didn't matter

anti matter dark matter dark energy matter
red giants white dwarves black holes pulsars
nebulas stars star systems galaxies universes dimensions
our heavens our earth our moon our sky you and i
all matter.
all.
matter.

VII. mitosis

i...
i love him
and i will pay with fire and brimstone
maybe i’ll realize
that the plot arc of my life
doesn’t really make any sense anymore
that i don’t know where i’m going
(i never really did)
and i’m falling i’m ******* falling

the potter's wheel lays in disuse
the clay has cracked
much like ourselves
crazed in the heat of our crucible
the teacups are but shards
and no golden lacquer remains
to mend, to smooth sharp edges

we cherish things until
we can replace them

"fragile, handle with care"
i didn’t test in an inconspicuous spot
i didn’t reset to factory default
i didn’t come assembled
but i didn’t come broken either

we were dealt the cards before
we even knew we were players

and i cry for innocence had,
and innocence lost
innocence misplaced,
and innocence taken

my nightmares lathered
in sterile surgeon cyan
after all, we lobotomized machines
could never feel

what pleasures lie,
in those frosty windowed wards!
arched backs, bucked hips
gossamer cauls of flesh unwillingly broken
bulimic hearts, skinny love
i need not drink but the viscous
milken nectar of our lust
what pleasure, achilles!
what pleasure?

what pleasure is there in
the supplication of sutured flesh?
iphigenia, astynome...briseis—
flesh blemished, removed, replaced
housing haunted souls

heracles, phaethon, oedipus, icarus...
are we too consigned to eternal song,
that bitter deathless death,
like our tragic forbearers?
our glory, our hamartia
lies only in our love, philtatos

when wisdom brings no profit
to be wise is to suffer

the proud will be humbled
and the humble will be exalted

quell your arrogance
mitotic spindle

my name means glory to the father
and i am the prodigal son

all is equal in the chaotic omniscience
of mitosis, of death, of entropy, of war

we? we are indivisible.

in a rather more living language
form frames function, I think we,
should we agree,
may make waves or points proving
science is good.

Clipped from: http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-unbearable-wholeness-of-beings

If you try to describe the living processes of the cell
in a rather more
living language
than is typically found
in the literature of molecular biology —
if you resort to a language
reflecting the artfulness and grace,
the well-coordinated rhythms,
and the striking choreography
of phenomena such as
gene expression,
signaling cascades, and
mitotic cell division —
you will almost
certainly
hear mutterings
about your flirtation with
“spooky, mysterious, nonphysical forces.”
You can expect to hear yourself labeled a “mystic” or —
there is hardly any viler epithet within biology today — a “vitalist.”