To find a poem that would live happily inside a bacterium—and would enable the professor to teach his microbial student to try its hand at a stanza that could be decoded—Bök combed through eight trillion ciphers and decided on this:- Christian Bok, "The Xenotext"
Any style of life / is prim
And the organism, which emits a red luminescence, always writes back:
The faery is rosy / of glow
Our high school cafeteria
ReplyDeleteGives solace to bacteria.
Staph infections propagate
On virtually every plate.
The place provides a great domain
For toxins known to cause ptomaine
Cold and flu germs fill the air
Waiting to pounce everywhere
And we have much cause to fear
A-mo-e-bic diarrhea,
...the latter fear is more apropos in South America.
ReplyDeleteA dissertation on bacterium
ReplyDeleteCould induce tremens delerium
The bearded youth's stile staccato
Seemed a bit too aggrivato
Until the happy moment that
He focused on the calico cat.
It used to be called mosaicism rather than stripy, I think. Women are essentially mosaics.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.vivo.colostate.edu/hbooks/genetics/medgen/chromo/mosaics.html
There was that story of a mother who was accused of benefit fraud because DNA maternity tests ‘proved’ she wasn’t related to her own children! Turned out to be a case of chimerism, as further tests showed.
Epigenetics, the idea gene expression may be dependent on the past behaviour of progenitors (genomic imprinting), is a little scary.
"...the latter fear is more apropos in South America."
ReplyDeleteAlas! Amoebic dysentery
Thanks much to Will and Orville
Has spread its fevered misery
From India to Allville
It's always been in Africa
And Asia and points south
It's spread through impure water,
From digestive tract to mouth
It's also now venereal
Thanks to Rock 'n Roll
Where drug use makes ethereal
The gross, out-of-control
Behavior of the hedonist
Who'd decency reject
And acts the role of arsonist
To all he should respect
And so it's universal
This malady once tropical
Of Progress a reversal
A health crisis sadly topical.
~ L'auteur Inconnue
First I'd ever heard of it. Chimeria's are, IMO, really scarey. Glad I didn't have a twin!
ReplyDeleteThe dream I had when still a lad
ReplyDeleteWas for a girl with skin of plaid
The lovely dream was broken sadly
In manner I can't suffer gladly
For I got stuck with one all stripey
Who's made my disposition gripey!
|;-)>
Touche, mon ami!
ReplyDelete