Do the Culture Clash
A new poem for Little Atoms’ Two Cultures series
If this book is a dystopia
then we live in a dystopia.
When women hold electrical power
in differing levels it’s a dystopia.
You can zap but you can’t count on zip
if the charge won’t fly and the genetic (
wings have evolved) possibility (and de-
evolved more than) remains (40 times)
many times
vestigial in the dystopia.
There’s cute, there’s more cute,
and there’s electrocute
in our dystopia.
The men are not much
less peculiar. The march of progress
brings you Homer Simp- ‘Tran-
sition of biological information’
much like an electri – cute! – electrician.
Gene flow events flow through
the caves we live in. Amid
the stalac-filigree, pedigree collapses:
branches fuse, the lights go out
or is it they ping on
throughout the dystopia.
How many cave men will it take…?
Channels flicker.
Flickr flickers.
Scientists go into hiding on rogue Twitter.
The one thing you can count on, cave men bicker.
There is a phantom species whose DNA
we carry (in our jeans)
in the dystopia and it’s such a heavy load.
The morphological constraints
should be profound when after all
the whole point was getting us to Nog
I mean Nod
I mean now
I mean not this
I mean – not this, not ever
in the –
Talk about Prometheus!
They made us who we are today
but we can’t read the code.
