Because they were not meant for the field,
They had love in the lab. The amorous intentions
Of the few who stare through strained glass and
Watch for signs. Passion over a burner,
The feelings associated with agar and clean rooms,
Technological fluorescent emotions.
Just disinfecting a test tube was seen as flirting,
The analogous action to something lascivious.
But by the time they’d admitted it,
It was coming to the end. A thesis and a
String of long days with no light but that
Which came through the glass bubble of the
Sacred dome in the wall was leading to the
Eventual end of something once grand. This grey
Romance, nothing but tragedy.
Re-planting weeds silently in small trays,
She uncorked and shouted at him,
“You’re a blind Ultra-Darwinian.
You’d gladly see species die for no
Reason but to theorize on their place in the
Overall ecosystem. You’d track it like so many
Nodes in a coalescence, you arrogant man.
I would suggest that you only want a paper out of this.
You savage! You malcontent! You dancing pet!”
The broken silence was a blitzkrieg,
Not echoing but thorough.
“And you’re nothing but a failed Marxist, trying to play
Overlord and God to something you’re an equal
Part of. You think your genome is special?
You’ve got magical base-pairings of holiness?
You think you don’t feel the same things as all
The rest of us swinging, pissing, angry apes?
No amount of determinism would keep
You from presenting if we were all out on the
Savanna struggling to walk upright, would it?”
And, at this devastation, this most cruel of insults,
The only thing he knew he could say to completely
Take all hope and encouragement away from her,
She could only cry, fearing that perhaps he was right.
Maybe this was all just an eventual zero-sum game
Of birth, life, bleeding, birth and death in a cold office.
Maybe it was all lyse and disperse, evaporate.
With soil in her eyes she could only see him turn his back on her
And begin plating out fields, his only true passion in life.
She knew she could never measure up to fungi and infectious
Disease in the eyes of this man, and she thought,
Ever so briefly, about running to him.
But that would have played into his filthy hands,
His grip were less appendage than sculpting blade.
Even from behind, she could see his eyes burning with the
Near erotic excitement of ruling over the existence of
So many crawling, starving half-beings, splitting their
Way into whatever eternity they could fathom.
He had excellent technique, and everyone knew it.
She hated his hands, envied them.
Instead, and to her great regret, she went back
To potting and trying not to moan into the
Loam between her fingers, with full knowledge
That her thesis would only be one more
Thing to do, one more thing to add
To a lonely string of letters after her name.
But not what she wanted.
Unable to save herself, she felt like Jesus hanging.