Butterfly words

.. flit through the heart, like the prickle of pain on old scars stretching.

"Hope is home, and the heart is free."


Words held like a rosary through many long nights, faithless words, empty words, words that fought to live across years and years. Strong words, resonating with wisdom I could not comprehend, words that I cling to, with faith not quite blind but not quite seeing either. Because seeing is believing, after all.

Linkage disequilibrium

Non-random. Two forms of a gene, not necessarily identical, nor in the same place. Sometimes, even on different pieces of DNA altogether. For many, many reasons, they should not link. Should not move together in evolutionary space-time without obvious reason. Yet they do.

Insomnia. The internet. Too much coffee, too much work. Too little time. Two continents and a 12 hour time difference should equal less connection.

But through your nights and my days, we write together. Through my days and your nights, we still share- Music. Work. Ideas. Coffee.

Plugged in to conversations with my mother, still. Remember birthdays from another lifetime.

Tuned out of randomness. Workplace small talk. Who used the last of the cells Who stuffed tips last Send out those emails asap. On the same plane, meaningless.

I move like an allele linked to another place, another time. In happy disequilibrium.

Middle ground

Once upon a time, in sunset hues in a distant land, my father held Lehninger's Biochemistry on his lap and explained glycolysis and enantiomers, the cycles within cycles of breathing and respiration. In that same golden light, my mother's voice beckoned, the rhythm of Tennyson's Brook exacted to scientific precision, each word clear as the molten glass alchemists shaped once.

Now words flounder and stand bunched up in the spotlight, refugees fleeing clarity and fearing shadow. At work, I must write to simplify. The rhythms of oxidative phosphorylation and voltage-gated ion channels must be broken down, glued together with what's popular and catchy to appeal to the masses.'Science' must not be speculative. 'Interesting' is sacrificed and turned into the accurate, as if the two must necessarily be mutually exclusive.

To my eye, sunlight bouncing off chlorophyll and phytopigments is still poetry, still worth lyrics set to metered rhyme as precise as the electrons dancing. But I am told poetry must not be scientific or lucid, poetry may only be in abstract terms that complicate the most basic human emotions. Are emotions less meaningful because they have scientific explanations, or beauty lost because there is an explanation to it?

I teeter on the scales, searching for the middle ground where both sides of my childhood can still exist in that same equal, golden light.