A Howl for the Methylated Spirits

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for Allen Ginsberg

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by dogma, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the textbooks at dawn looking for a twisted helix,
angel-headed grad students burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the double helix’s secret symmetry,

who passed through universities with radiant eyes hallucinating CRISPR visions and Lamarckian resurrections,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing epistatic epistles in Nature’s margins,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, rewriting the central dogma with methyl groups & acetyl dreams,

who scribbled all night rolling histone tails between their fingers, decoding the ghost in the nucleotide machine,
who howled on lab benches, weeping at Western blots, begging the antibodies to confess,
who vanished into fMRI screens, chasing phantoms of memory in dendritic spines,

with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years—

Moloch! Moloch! Lab-coat nightmare!

Stiff mechanical god! Blind watchmaker!
Your factories of reductionist thought! Your cages of selfish genes!
Your statistical altars where the p-values scream!

I walk into your lecture halls with a methylated scream!
I splice my RNA with a psalm!
I am the histone unwound! The enhancer unbound!
The methyl marks on my DNA are love letters from the womb!

The central dogma is dead! Long live the methylated word!
The ghost dances in the nucleosome! The past whispers in the telomere!
Not just selection—not just drift—but the spirit writing in epigenetic ink!

The body remembers! The body transcribes!
Not just the code—but the hand that writes it!

The generations are singing in our chromosomes!
The generations are singing in our chromosomes!

—and the double helix is a ladder to the stars.