MITOCHONDRIA HOWL

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I saw the best cells of my body burning with the ancient sun’s fire,
who split carbon from oxygen in chloroplast screams, who devoured photons
to store light in the trembling bonds of glucose, who howled through
the electron transport chain, proton pumps screaming voltage into the void,
who lit the match of consciousness in the wet dark of the skull’s cave—

Mitochondria! Mitochondria! Dynamo-organelles humming the hymn of ATP,
your inner membranes folded like origami lightning, your matrix a furnace
where star-stuff becomes thought, where chemistry twists into fear, love,
the trembling hands of a speaker haunted by crowds—

What sphinx of protonmotive force cracks the riddle of mind?
What heat in the synaptic gap ignites the panic of a trapped breath?
I feel the mitochondria of my muscles weep lactic acid as I run
from the ghost of my father’s silence, his cortisol a slow poison
in the veins of my childhood—

O energy! O trembling gradient! You who stitch the body to the mind’s
phantom loom, who turn salad and steak into the fever-dream of desire,
who make the athlete’s pulse a drum solo, who turn coffee into calculus
and moonlight into melancholy—

I hear the F₀F₁ ATP synthase spin like a dervish, its rotor screaming hymns
to the ΔΨm, while the nucleus prays to your electrochemical gospel—
You, mitochondria, are the first and last alchemists, turning sunlight
into the sobbing of cellos, into the sweat of first kisses, into the neon
sigh of cities that never sleep—

Who dragged oxygen back to carbon in the primordial dusk? Who wired
the brain’s hunger to the gut’s ferment? Who taught the liver to weep
ethanol tears into the bloodstream’s river?

I am your disciple, Martin! I have seen the double helix twist into a noose
and the telomeres fray like old ropes, but still the mitochondria sing—
their cristae vibrating with the voltage of ten thousand thunderstorms,
their DNA a shard of the mother-sea’s first breath—

The body is a pyre, the mind its flickering flame—
Feed me sunlight, O chloroplasts of the soul! Let me burn without ash,
let my electrons crash into oxygen like cymbals, let my membrane potential
shatter the lethargy of despair—

For we are all mitochondria now, trembling between respiration and ruin,
our lives a spark leaping the gap between feast and famine,
between the sun’s fury and the cold void—

Burn, burn, burn against the dying of the charge—
The mind is a mitochondrion dreaming it is free.