Jungle-floor bacteria devour helicopters after war;
ripped human corpses thaw, screaming, in battle zone

Smog-sucking moss evolves to grow on auto bumpers;
gas-tank tapeworm writhes: blind premium dreams

Heavy weaponry of corporate wars, intractable
ultimatum when lawyers subpoena their own DNA

Cockroaches skitter: dust of broken televisions;
lay phosphorescent eggs between commercials

Reunification pressures force abandonment of immortality;
death substitutes for taxes: final cost of doing business

Skinned headless lizard throbs, shoved into your chest:
replicant replaces your broken-once-too-often heart

Time & nucleotide
wait for no man

2300-2320
15 sep 92

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http://www2.hn.psu.edu/faculty/jmanis/a~pope/Pope-Iliad.pdf

Another race the following spring supplies;
They fall successive, and successive rise:
So generations in their course decay;
So flourish these, when those are pass’d away.

It’s a shame that renaissance and baroque poets, such as Dante and Milton, felt the need to stuff their works so full of obscure names and references from classical mythology.

Educated readers must have been familiar with them at the time; but nobody today has a clue who these characters are, and one can’t help feeling that rather spoils the lofty and inspirational effect they were striving to achieve.

Quotes:
“What could be more emotionally electrifying than, after millennia of human struggles to understand what has been seen as the threatening mystery of erratic nature, to learn why bad things happen to all of us? To be rapidly released from the prison of fear of an uncertain threatening world that is still present in so many societies and cultures? To be shown in a few minutes the ultimate reasons for the fragility of our prized possessions and to reflect on the normally sturdy protections of activation energies for our artifacts and such energies along with biochemical feedback patterns for our even more fragile biochemistry?”

“Activation energy barriers must be recognized as our essential bulwarks against the second law of thermodynamics’ predictions.”

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that does fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding-dong,
Hark! Now I hear them – Ding-dong, bell.

Or try J.R.R. Tolkien:

This thing all things devours:
Birds, beasts, trees, flowers;
Gnaws iron, bites steel;
Grinds hard stones to meal;
Slays king, ruins town
And beats high mountain down.

Also, the year before this version was published, in 1611, Shakespeare was (you guessed it) 46 years old!

The allusions to Thermodynamics in this poem made me think of the explanation I once heard that Genesis, at my friends synagogue, is interpreted by them as a poetic telling of the Big Bang, galaxy formation, planet accretion and so forth. He even said he noticed a reference to the CMB.