For Archie
Sometimes I feel I’ve shacked up
with low-life instincts: the apes
rise in my genes and call me sister.
Hate clogs my brainstem
like a bad drain.
On better days I edge toward
one of the shining
abstracts, love not least
among them, mind bobbing,
a white mum above
the body’s rubble. Let’s say
then I’m soaring above the next-door
neighbor’s bray of fast
tans, bucks, bitches
out to get her
man, I’m sensing
the molecules’ spark, the DNA’s game
for change: how in ten millennia
such friction kindles
a new species, a being
that in the mean time,
like a halting dawn
consents to gentle the sting
of consciousness.
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