STEM cells

Being a woman, it took a lot of courage

The kind that clenches your abdomen

Like menstruation,

And then it was only once, not monthly. 

I once asked a cosmologist

about his poetic tendencies, I thought I caught

a glimmer, it was in fact, a pungent reaction.

The mere concept was rejected as any preposterous old electron

Would be out of line. Needless to say, the hypothesis was

Brushed off like the free radical

I was standing there, circling him

And trying to get in-closer.

I was the chicken laying an egg,

Peeking inside his paradox.

In hindsight, it was foolish,

Asking an astrophysicist, a theoretical one, anyway

About his propensity with words, metaphorically,

In lieu of his numerical potency,

Silly me, little lady.

Considering I am entitled to (k)no(w) facts,

In my female tone, I displayed

A type of  indiscretion, often a woman’s way

Of adding verbs to scientific theory.  

Photo credited to National Photo Company; c. 1919, Restored by Adam Cuerden [Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Bulbous

The earth slows down
just enough to focus on a handle
as if made for us,
made for touching and gauging
the sum of all things
with the unbearable lightness of possessing nothing
earnestly.
Time flies, hope levitates, spines flex in-
tensely repulsing gravity
just to keep up-
right
after the fact, I heard back home
the mighty oaks had toppled on perfect-
ly calm days,
the redwoods, however, stood their ground.
Meanwhile,
down here, the passiflora
already swallowed the fence
and now nibbles away at the eave.
On this evening
the colors come too quick to name.
It was
the tulips
we were expecting
to Spring,
the wait was too much to hold still.
Over centuries,
it has been discovered
our heads have become rounder.
When I look harder
it seems like
Venus' belt is shrinking.




Painting by Franz Werner Tamm [Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Global warming Returns

There was fire reflected in his eyes,

and though he had been so kind lately,

been treating me tenderly,

it all shattered 

in the calm evening 

after dinner was served and the dishes were done.

There was no wind but things carried. 

He screamed at me 

from the doorway, from deep in his diaphragm,

‘Get Out Now!’

And I thought he was angry at me 

for a flashing moment-I felt

enraged-by the tone.

I noticed, however,

his face was glowing-not from

the evening sunset.

My eyes went south-

east, thirty feet tall, 

a basket of burning serpents

squirmed atop a roof and were licking  the sky,

devouring a tree,

the roof next door is on fire! 

A black plume expands like dye in water,

like a volcano that erupts before projecting 

sound.

In the long hot silence, 

before the sirens in the distance, 

my heart

strains to find a steady rhythm amidst

the pops, cracks and snaps. 

The cats are hiding, children are 

lining the street filming,

hoses are flowing anemic,

I am frozen in place.

I think of how we just survived the flood.

When the fire finally died, 

we waited for the third

and last

good Friday before we may rise and shine

only to be born again

on Sunday. 

Painting by George Hitchcock c. 1904, 'Easter Sunday' in [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Line by line

Life unfolds this way,

the face now resembles our grey matter

what is inside comes out.

The clouds will unravel again,

you can hear the wind 

moving them along.
I am done
telling others to listen.

Paper, then. My life. Drawn to fire.

All those the people carrying dead burdens
on their cracking lips.

They burned books
into their memories and cauterized the wounds

with chanting and invocations

shaped to sound like smoke rings

they read the signs.

As with people and colors
they gather but do not become,
one another,
as with clouds, the heaviest fall
and we say we needed rain.

In these conditions

the symbols bleed together

and it is red
Open.




Painting by Emile Claus, c. 1898, 'Ampelio, old fisherman of Bordighera', in [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Scientific Methodology: Poetic Method

"Science should be poetry, and poetry science."

Para-phrased:

"Science is the organized, systematic enterprise that gathers knowledge about the world and condenses the knowledge into testable laws and principles,"

“Likewise with independent investigations, the same phenomenon is sought.”

1.) Fundamentally, to be known, trusted, retold and in order to be 

added as ammunition to the cannon, revolving on the poetic or scientific roster,

we need more than one (time), we need repetition (in science), practice and reproduction (imagination and readymades), and so on, and so on…

2.) the economy, indeed, it is most necessary.

I wholeheartedly agree, employing a simultaneity

of elegance and condensery-ing less into more, more or less...

(i.e. the largest amount of information with the least amount of effort)

Yes, go on.

3.) Strength, the virility, most importantly,

must be consistent in some-such-way,

creating a co-mensuration between 

not bang and emergence,

fourth, and forth.

4.) The spewing of more than we knew we had.

The best of which inspires the search for more.

And finally-fifthly

5.) Consilience, he says, is the one way to be

profound with words.

Experimental,

science and art shared the words

methodology and madness,

we have seen 

the singularity as abstract art. 

The weight 

of the line

was the same.
A ton of feathers
still won't fly without direction.

(based on the book ‘Consilience, The Unity of Knowledge’ by E.O. Wilson pg. 58)

Drawing By Wilson, E.O. (1985). "Ants From the Cretaceous and Eocene Amber of North America". Psyche: A Journal of Entomology 92 (2–3): 205–216. DOI:10.1155/1985/57604. (Psyche: A Journal of Entomology) [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons.

Saplings

Not a lack of empathy could turn us-

or the inability to love the ‘other’-
rationally,

we small rats.
It separates us.
A green miasma seeping up

from the loamy soil.
Familiar, like family, the smell of our
(grand) Father.
Toes curl and cringe and yet

we knew all about decomposition,

slanging dirt on white walls,
shit that flies and flows downhill.

We recognize, collectively
all information is absorbed,
the leaves in turn
throw shade.

Dark times don't always dictate
a Virgil. This time,
we were early.

It only takes a conceit to break
sacred ground.

All this diurnal mist adds up
and seeps in-
to crystal beads made for
costume jewellery
to be strung across
the sky.

There were stars
where pupils should be.

Scurrying mice and men gather

blind,
feeling their way away
from a threat that smelt like a fresh
grave.
All information is recreated
to be fertile today.

It stinks making fresh air.

Painting by Tom Roberts [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Mammalian

Gasping,
the weight of all worldy air
light enough to float
gathered together atop my chest,
paralyzing me in between states of consciousness.

Now,
I am not worried about dying. I am not suffocating
from this.
I can feel the sun sucking out all the moisture
I have accumulated solar radiation,
the evaporation sometimes itches,
crackling my skin.

I can hear the white waves crashing below me,
at my feet,
the atmosphere levitates between solid and vapor.

I can feel the displacement of the ground under my body
wedged between a million grains and cannot move
under this compression.

This thick skin has held too much inside.
Over time,
the walls between this and that breakdown-
ocean, air, lung and rib, my marrow margins.
Any body,
I dare
touch me, a moment before the explosion
feel how forms are all temporary.

*
It was just this thought
of a suicidal great whale. My morning, anxiousness.
Beached him or herself.
What is left of this shell?
The gastric juices digesting itself,
as if there was one final thing to
finish
breaking down.

Gravity does not let us change our mind
either,
I was about to explode
myself.

Image By Avenue (Own work), stranded Grey's beaked whale in New Zealand [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.