Macbeth

Oh, no, my friends, you’ve got it all wrong, and I’ll take your sleeve and the hem of your shirt, on my knees, to explain how. Viruses are the sun gods, they are an endless, unmoving ode to being alive and to the history of being alive.

The held flow of ancient, specific genes which existed before cellular life, and which are the bedrock of all life today and

The carry of the sweet smell of dog roses on their breath (which does not exist).

These ones of the lowest gene kiddie-pool have kept their identity through the entire history of biology. When you prop up this skeleton of thought, remember that the viruses were present in the Bible, in Dante’s Inferno, in every book and verse and stanza ever committed. In every composition and song, and every flower and wedding. In every car crash, in every infant death. They are present in every mouthful you chew, in every birth. Remember, when you flip this around and inspect the underbelly, that every human thought and emotion is host to the viruses. You’d be forgiven for thinking that God moves in mysterious ways of His own volition, but He, too, plus every principality, demon and squirming biological mass He ever created is present in the marketplace for, and from, viruses to create and consume as they must.

Are you feeling guilty for being alive? Are you an especially special awful kind of person? Offer yourself up to the monolith then, those membranes of yours are built tightly packed but there are still pores, they’re permeable, they’re penetrable, they’re porous, they’re pervious. Let me insert my little hook, and pry apart those lipids (not really macromolecules, you know, but everyone will tell you they are) and spread some proteins. I’ll make a wide enough gape to slide in my little finger and then it will be over for you, no more need for active transport across those sweet, saline boundaries. When it comes to a hole bigger than a finger, all movement is passive. Oh God, you’re so leaky. You’re so sticky and warm and all I want to do is fill you up with road agents and capable engineers.

I know you won’t. It’s ok, I know it seems absurd and unnatural, as if unnatural ever existed to begin with. You rube. You joke. They don’t want you because you’re bad, they want you because you’re perfect and capable of perfection. They want your golden molecules without even knowing they want them. It’s a silky rapture, an unknowable compulsion and they pulse, pulse, pulse in and out of you and your relatives since your relatives lived in the fields and the skies and not these pre-fabricated cartons and boxes and plastic bags.

This disease is beyond my practice, lost to the sere – noble, dead Duncan and wronged MacDuff. Hail. The dog rose growing up my arm, climbing into my nostrils and putting me to bed, to bed for six whole days to vomit and writhe and wonder. Dagger drawn, I ran the roses out back to the heath to return to a place of fresh health.

The chiffon thread that weaves between you and I is dusky pale pink and it’s assembled from all the dead things between us, whispering words in languages we should know. Words we should know, that only serve to frighten us.