Selections from archived “science poetry.”

Guess What?

8/16/2014

You will build a new science--
break the umbrellas,
make the artists shudder.
But they'll come running back to you
when you show them this spectacular Earth
through the eyes of what She is.
(It's a shame you will be gone.)

Because today
Science is a game you don't win.
It plays you until you're thinner than thought,
until you're a whisper who doesn't know what sane is.
It hits you in the bones before you know,
and then your brain is too young to live,
too tired to die.

You're too tired to [be a] mind.

Now you twist and writhe like your code
unfolds into a joke you don't hear.
Didn't they tell you?
Your life has already happened before you know,
before Science even knows.

Guess what?
It's written in your cell[s].

into the sun

5/21/2014

we out-evolved the planet. 

yes, I can believe it. 

but this ageless plastic?

—I cannot heave it. 

we out-evolved the planet—

look: the ground is numbers

where it used to be green. 

we put a clock on organic. 

we took these bottles

and we made the glass into a new sea. 

where is the ruth we adapted? 

and did we know 

that the earth was moving

when we made her dance 

into the sun? 

and will you go 

up there?

when the stars are glass, 

when the sky is plastic too? 

—oh

no. 

I think I'll stay here.

I think I'll stay,

my roots are 

in far

too

deep. 

I think I'll stay far too deep.

least concern

5/6/2013

"mingle,"
   murmurs the mangrove tree,
      roots like fingers in foamy green.

"ever swim the forest sea?"

the heartwood gurgles velvety,
   in muddy beds, in snapper dreams.

feed on me, not poison seeds
   but smoke of pods,
      leaves brewed for tea.

the fruit it floats, fine salts secrete,
   and branches slay the storms at speed.

but life is raw--
    each day a clock
for shrubs
    who lie tangled in the coastal niche.

"mingle,"
   murmurs the mangrove tree,
      roots like fingers drift out to sea.

chromosome

12/12/2011

yes, I would like to be sequenced.

I do care to know
my structure
my function
my fit
and how we swim in all of it--

these flavors
when they mix
fresh colors fluoresce
in the aqueous
and we tumble for years
in the swirls of cyan and magenta
until we all homogenize
and then we are old--

we are all grey liquid 
in the acid sea.

destination indigo

2/26/2011

Xander engineers with the alien fingers--
unnerves the geiger counter,
and syncs the orbit clockwise.

watch his pupils glitter,
watch his blacksmithing bones
as they do the machinal,
over Daedalus' tomb.

watch his hungry hands,
and watch his pupils slither
as they glue the gears of city
and droid on down the Iron Road.

read him with a stethoscope,
(and write out 'I don't know.')

read him with a stethoscope,
(and write out 'metronome.')

Xander frays your nerves
and quotes them like the classics,
puts your heart back in your mouth,
washes down the battery acid.