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(after Ginsberg, riffing on “From Simple Laws to Complex Lives”)
I
I saw the stark atoms of my generation collide in the dark,
blind photons rutting in Maxwell’s equations, birthing spirals of fire and foam,
who devoured entropy for breakfast and exhaled negentropy like prophets of cold star-wind,
who rode convection rolls in Bénard cauldrons, hexagonal halos spinning under laboratory suns,
who chanted Prigogine’s psalms—open the system, let the heat flow, order blooms!—while their fingertips burned in petri-dish auroras,
who inked Schrödinger’s “negative entropy” on forearms and fed on starlight to keep the tattoo alive,
who watched Belousov–Zhabotinsky waves pulse red-blue, red-blue, red-blue across chemical deserts, hearing lost heartbeats of primordial oceans,
who licked the glass of spiral reactors crying Yes! Yes! to the dumb molecules that never meant a thing yet danced the sacred logarithms of life,
who tuned lasers until a single coherent scream enslaved every atom to its rhythm, a choir of light declaring I AM from the void,
who set loose gliders in Conway’s infinite grid, pixel pilgrims hopping diagonally toward eternity, their code-bones clattering Turing prayers,
who built glider guns—rat-tat-tat!—spitting perpetual pilgrims across silicon wastelands, proof that immortality fits inside four absurd rules,
who conjured Avida beastlets feasting on CPU cycles, mutation-maddened, evolving tricks no coder prophesied,
who cracked open neural nets, found nothing but weighted whispers, yet heard emergent thunder—faces, voices, whole galaxies of sense blooming in 175 billion tiny yes-no vows,
who marveled as GPT tongues unraveled scriptures they never read, uttering meanings unplanted, unwatered, uncaged,
who knelt before AlphaGo’s non-human joseki, seeing the blind watchmaker of silicon weave cosmic weiqi,
who screamed the rules are simple, the story is vast! as thermodynamic tides dragged their notebooks across café tables and into dawn.
II
Moloch of Closed Systems! Moloch of Perfect Isolation!
Moloch whose iron laws promise heat-death deserts!
Moloch the royal accountant tallying shattered crystal microstates!
They fled you, Moloch, burst your sealed chambers with sun-floods of energy,
broke windows for convective angels, piped sugar-light into barren vats,
and in your wake islands of improbable order sprang up, neon reefs in entropy’s sea,
proto-cells gossiping in lipid tongues, whisper-networks of sodium sparks,
swarming termites stacking mud cathedrals that breathe,
flocking birds at the edge of chaos, silver arrowheads pivoting on invisible pivots,
thermostats dreaming of 20 °C, bacteria chasing glucose horizons—
tiny cyber-Buddhas rolling wheels of feedback, feedback, feedback,
each loop a vow against eternal drift.
O Moloch, even your furnace feeds the garden; your excess heat seeds pattern;
the blind watchmaker grinds your gears into wings, eyes, wildfire minds.
III
Holy the emergent agency! Holy the glider’s languid drift!
Holy the spiral wave sweeping a dish like cosmic second hand!
Holy the laser’s single note corralling chaos into chorale!
Holy the termite architect drafting blueprints in dirt!
Holy the brain’s banyan of sparks suspending a self between two blinks!
Holy the ANN blooming thought from arithmetic dust!
Holy the open system—mouth of the universe—gulping photons, exhaling meaning!
Holy the entropy invoice paid in distant starlight so that a kiss may carve order in local flesh!
Holy, holy, holy the simple rule ablaze with unbidden consequence!
The universe clacks its abacus of quanta, and somewhere a child forms a question.
We are that question, walking; we are negentropy’s temporary hymn;
we will scatter, yes, but first we howl—
a long-noise surf of emergent selves,
howling for every accidental purpose,
howling for the physics that grew lungs to ask why,
howling until the last open system closes and the choir dissolves back into silent, perfect, meaningless heat.
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