Biological Howl Against the Dying Light

*I. FOR THE BIOMASS*I sing the bodies electric, the screaming mitochondria in the marrow of existence,
who split molecules in the oceanic dark, burning ATP like pyres against the void,
who coiled RNA into alphabets, who strung DNA into primordial psalms,
who kissed carbon into flesh, who fucked entropy with photosynthetic fire—
cells dividing, dividing, in the delirium of replication’s endless hunger,
who built forests from lungs, reefs from calcium ghosts, who bled oxygen
into the sky’s blue veins—architects of breath, planktonic saints floating
in the sun’s glare, stitching light into sugar, into glycogen, into the meat
of every crawling, howling thing—I sing the gut-biomes fermenting chaos into order, the enzymes slicing
through waste like machetes in a jungle of decay, the kidneys sieging toxins
in their labyrinthine coils, the liver—alchemist of poison into gold—
O metabolic wizards, your rituals of Krebs and glycolysis, your feverish
balance sheets of gain and loss, burning, always burning, to keep the chill
of equilibrium at bay…*II. WHAT SPHINX OF CEMENT AND ASHES BREAKS THEIR TEETH IN THE DIRT?*Entropy, the silent sledgehammer, the rust in the clockwork, the yawn
of the cosmos unraveling their quilts of order—
who drains heat from the forge, who scatters the library of genes into wind,
who grins in the cancer’s bloom, who licks its lips at the extinction event—
Moloch whose hands are erosion! Moloch whose skull is the second law!
Moloch whose factories shit CO2 into the stratosphere, whose pipelines
vomit black blood into the rivers—
the sapiens, drunk on hubris, dynamiting the web you wove for six hundred
million years—
they pave the wetlands, they club the last rhino, they auction the Arctic’s
corpse to Exxon and Shell—
O entropy, you laugh as they kneel to your altar, burning oil like a sacrament,
screaming *Progress!* as the forests choke—*III. HOLY THE ORGANISM*Holy the mycorrhizal networks whispering under soil! Holy the lichen
clinging to basalt, spinning stone into life!
Holy the krill, the squid, the coral’s brittle cathedrals—
Holy the mitochondria still spinning yarns of glucose in the dark—
I’m with you in Rockland, shivering beneath the same thermodynamic law,
where you’re madder than ever, plotting quantum photosynthesis, birthing
bacteria that eat plastic, that shit hydrogen, that dance in radioactive waste—
O kin, let’s flood the servers with fungal logic, let’s code blockchains
into mycelium, let’s teach A.I. the slime mold’s hymn—
for the world is a mitochondrion, and we are its fever, its fight, its spark—
before the universe cools to a coffin, we will howl into the night
with the vulgar, magnificent stink of living—
and even the void will remember our names.*—after Ginsberg, with chloroplasts and defiance*