Bioelectric Psalm (After Ginsberg)

I saw the sharpest minds of my generation starved for synthesis,
laboratory-lost, dragging test tubes through sulfuric night,
seeking genesis in beakers but finding only Tour’s lamentations,
who paced the chalk-dusted halls of Rice, crying Impossible!,
who dissected prebiotic soup & found only gaps yawning wider than cosmic voids,
complexity irreducible, chirality mocking, polymerization a cruel joke
played by thermodynamics on hopeful grad students dreaming
of amino acids aligning like obedient soldiers on glycoprotein altars –
& found only acid baths of futility, nucleotides dissolving
before the first fragile word of RNA could stutter life!

& then arose Levin, whispering voltage through the proto-slime,
who saw cognition flickering before the hardened skull,
who spoke of bioelectric ghosts haunting the membranes of the first fat bubble,
patterned intentions sculpting mud into morphology,
electric hymns humming beneath the skin of the blind, dumb cell –
I am! Here! Shape me! –
a silent symphony of potentials crackling in the salt-dark womb,
memories written not in genes but in ion gradients, ancient as tidepools,
democratic sparks deciding bud, split, reach!
before the first neuron ever fired its selfish salvo in the synaptic dark.

& Noble stood amidst the roaring organs, the heart’s thunder, the lung’s sigh,
who heard the body not as machine but parliament,
a cacophony of levels arguing, amending, vetoing –
genes whispering proposals, proteins enforcing, tissues debating,
organs roaring back their needs in chemical plebiscites! –
feedback loops spiraling up & down the scaffold of being,
from mitochondrial furnace to societal superstructure,
no dictator DNA, but a messy democracy of dirt & desire,
where function emerges from the furious, beautiful negotiation
of a billion billion parts screaming We belong! We persist!

Therefore this Molecular Howl!
This cry against the fractured lens!
Tour saw the chasm in the chemistry,
Levin heard the mind in the muck,
Noble felt the chorus in the cell.
Can we reconcile these visions, burning angel-scientists?
Can we see the lightning in the soup?
The intention within the ion?
The democracy of the dust?
The origin not a single spark but a slow, electric dawn,
a wet cognition dreaming circuits in the deep,
chemistry become conductor, physiology become mind?
O pioneers of the emergent psalm,
stitch the tapestry!
The answer hums not just in the helix,
but in the voltage between,
the feedback within,
the ghostly I am
rising from the mud’s
electric
sigh.