Vox Populi
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Michael Gregory: This is your mind as green slime mold
Love is always inappropriate
– Donna Haraway
.
This is your mind as green slime mold
learning to make your way through the labyrinth
an octopus growing new tentacles
a starfish arm growing a new starfish.
This is your mind as a butterfly emerging
with still-damp wings from the chrysalis it entered
as a caterpillar, enshrouded itself in swaddling,
dissolved into a disgusting gooey mess,
metamorphosed into a fragile beauty
that flies, feeds, excretes, in genitive mode
leaves offspring to restart the engine, then dies again.
.
This is your mind as interlarded cyberspace
a plasmic jello that networks neurotic and semiotic
codes and signals, an intermittent reflexive web
of entropic pulsations going on and off through rhizomatic
nongeometric transmission and reception tendrils
rooted in cellular vocabularies,
the whole shebang constituting a cosmos in a nutshell
a dumbbell ontology you come to call yourself
a liminal being unable to see itself in the mirror
a bioelectronic nomenclatural mechanism
about as lovable as an intransitive verb.
.
This is your mind expressing your hybrid self
as body and soul a working assemblage composed
of what’s in the water air soil and smoke,
mingling molecules and attitudes
sinews and desires platitudes and functions
nervous circuits and circadian rhythms pure crap
and masterful conceptions, touching each other
with tentative fingertips breath insight and wonder,
sharing our persons, our lives, with one another
for better or worse as we see fit depending
on circumstances we face from our coming to birth.
.
This is your mind as subatomic playing field
waves and particles exchanging identities
in constant mathematical flux in and out of
existence, no fixed address in radiant spectrum
the very definition of uncertainty an
unfathomable incomprehensible
emptiness between nodes of possibility
a hypothetical multidimensional moment
where even under strict laboratory procedures
without the slightest trace of erotic intent photons
become entangled at a distance in no time at all.
Copyright 2021 Michael Gregory
Michael Gregory’s many books include Mr. America Drives his Car (Post-Soviet Depression, 2013). He lives off the grid in rural Arizona.
Vox Populi 
Wow! Love this poem.
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One I will reread ( ye old zoology student is still there despite the passing of time)
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