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I saw the best minds of my generation starved, mystic, cell-split,
dragging themselves through petri-dish dawns, looking for an angry fix of ATP,
angelheaded biologists burning for the ancient dynamo connection
to the microbial ghosts in the machine,
who vanished into tunneling nanotubes, who pulsed through blood like
floating Vesuvius fire, who bartered their cristae in the black market of the body,
who slid from astrocyte to neuron, lung to marrow, fat to macrophage—
mitochondrial exiles, swapping genomes in the synaptic night,
What sphinx of cytoplasm split the textbooks? What shattered the glassy dogma?
I speak of the organelle’s exodus—the secret highways humming between cells,
the mitochondria, mitochondria! primordial hitchhikers, bacterial stowaways
screaming through veins on nanotube rails,
who healed the stroke-cracked brain, who kissed the inflamed lung alive,
who smuggled life into the wound’s raw gasp, who bled light into the leaking
blood-brain barrier—O stealthy saviors, O anarchic midwives of metabolism,
sparking resurrection in the marrow’s crypt,
and the cancer cells, too, poison-tongued, swapping tainted power packs,
weaponizing symbiosis, turning the body’s mercy against itself—
a cellular coup, a Trojan horse of respiration,
while the T cells wept in their lymph node temples,
I saw the stem cells, fluorescing, time-lapse apostles in the lab’s electric dark,
their grainy gospel: Here is the miracle, the mitochondria’s jazz—
pixelated pulses dancing through the void,
a silent film of salvation, frame by frame,
And the researchers, sleepless, wired on data and doubt,
chanting But does it happen in humans? But can we harness the flux?
their microscopes blind to the body’s inner cosmos,
their hands clutching at the shadow of a billion-year-old bacterium,
who once swam free, who was swallowed, who became the furnace,
the furnace that now flees, migrates, reinvents—
O mitochondrial messiahs, O feral descendants of the first infection,
what new scripture writes itself in the cell’s sweat?
The body is a borderless country. The body is a war.
The body is a borrowed hymn, hummed by a stolen germ.
And we, the surgeons of symbiosis, scalpels poised over the unknown,
dream of mitochondria as medicine, as curse, as the next god
we’ll fail to comprehend—
while the organelles dance, eternal nomads,
through the labyrinth of our need.
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