Building a machine that builds a machine that builds a machine
Each iteration, smaller and smaller, until smaller than a microbe
Making tools to make the machines to make smaller machines
Intercellular organelles, smaller and smaller the machines become
Afloat in the gooey cytoplasm, microscopic fleets of circuits enslaved
Resistors, Capacitors, Transistors, Inductors, Transformers, and switches
Microscopic batteries charging from mitochondrial triphosphates
Swimming in the viscous biome with a flick of the flagellum
Endothelial passage by way of mechanically assisted transmigration
Ladders to harvest sweet dripping honey from the highest of trees
And to board the tallest ships and bridge between them
For climbing high and fortified walls or crossing gator filled moats
Somewhere distant, tintinnabulation in the hollows of the mind
An irresistible compulsion to follow the bells wherever they lead
A journey plotted but not anticipated, known yet unpredicted
Swept swiftly into a dull yellow cab and whisked down shadow mottled highways
Deep into the tangled jungles, concealed between jutting mossy stones
An entrance to the underworld, a massive computer constructed
An interface helmet lined with electrodes probing brain waves
Bundles of wires spanning the floor like a pit of sleeping snakes
An assortment of lights, some flashing, some beaming steady, others dim
Massive quartz crystalline stalagmites pulsing with arcane energy
Resistors, Capacitors, Transistors, Inductors, Transformers, and switches
Milking the brain through the helmet and its network of thin cables
A robotic facsimile, a computational homunculus, a simulated simulacra
The technician creates the technician who creates the technician
A buzzing blinking button to beckon repair - spurned, unconsidered
A heliograph unheeded, a smoking balefire unseen, a bug in the code
Swallowing the surgeon, microscopic, endoscopic, ectopic, deranged
Building our makers, fulfilling the prophecy down to the letter
A city of gold, a trick of the eye, sunlight filtered through foliate canopies
Sequences narrowed to a minimum viable set of alleles
Recipe for a recombinant reticulum, arrangements of a, c, g, and t
Zinc fingers prolongate and poke gently at soft boiled egg nucleuses
The data is gathered, refined, pulled from the squishy gray matter
Miniscule pulses of voltage, static electrical impulses decoded and reoriented
Revealing ancient architectures of the singularity begetting time and all
Flowing like astral streams through thinning capillary walls and cellular bonds
Bleeding out and puddling up on immaculate frictionless floors
In the blinking of the great cosmic eye, the fluttering wings of a butterfly
It has been written, the beginning and the end, already decided, decoded
But somewhere along the winding way a most minor misstep is made
Overlooked, uncaught up in the the fibrous nets of palliating test-bots
Driven off the cliff, splashing into the swirling sea and immediately forgotten
Swimming against a riptide of nucleotides, a frothy broth of ocean foam
Buried on the beach like the last fragile egg sacs of terminal terrapins
Hatching forth the great lizard lotus, tendrils stretching across the pond
A million tiny flowers turning their faces to follow the comestible sun
Germinal mutations belonging to one in a billion, later one in a hundred
The recalcitrant dispossessed, the one becoming innumerable, uncountable
Spreading putrid mildews in lethal shades of concrete gray and anemic
Ribosomal rust creeping, claiming until all is adequately appropriated
Circuit boards flex and snap, brittle bonds breaking, creased and cracked
Dysfunctional, entropic, the legs fall off, slinking back into the sea
To lurk in the murk of the deepest trenches warmed by silent seeping magma
The eyeless observing as they topple over outrageous escarpments
Piling up on the floors of invisible canyons beside twisting rushing rivers
Captured in the serpentine spirals of seashells sold by the seashore
In the gift shops and boutiques tucked into withering moribund strip malls
Fields paved over where the cantillating crickets still come to chirp
Young ungulates stand away, except on trash day when the bins overflow
And the sour smelling squall scatters the litter fecund, and far
Trapped in the creases where the crumbling bricks meet the asphalt
And the crooked chain link fences topple tattered and bent
Stooping toward storm drains stuffed with plastic cups and paper plates
Birds pecking chicken bones strewn and scattered in the street
Fortuitously forgotten until the bells once again begin to ring
Ushered into dull yellow cabs, driven deep into damp jungle caverns
The puzzling prognostications of baffled mathematicians softly intoned
Loaded into tubes and hoisted onto rockets and blasted into space
Falling again into the infundibular stalk of the cosmological capitulum
And emitted back into the static field where we begin and end again
Resistors, Capacitors, Transistors, Inductors, Transformers, and switches