The Despairing Posture

Look, what’s going on with you,
Deaths red, black, and blue, carries
Far less implicatory

Baggage than what’s going on,
Been going on for trillions
Of generations, between

Bacteriophages and their
Host bacteria. It’s eat
Or be defeated, defeat

Or be eaten. You recruit
Phages yourselves to attack
The bacteria you host,

Using us to help you find
And fight a war more ancient
Than any you understand.

The bacteria fight back.
You fight back. Phages fight back.
We fight back. We evolve,

They evolve, and they evolve,
Even you evolve a bit,
But thanks to immune systems

And now to us, you don’t change
A hundredth as much as us,
As them inside them in them.

So why arrange us in tales
In the despairing postures
Your bodies take when they fall?

It’s hardly flesh that’s doing
The hard fighting anymore.
Any plague that you survive,

Meaning death by something else,
You either survived by luck,
Or thanks to us—just maybe

Thanks to your own resilient,
Adaptive immune systems.
We can imagine a world

In which you’re all or almost
Gone, and then it’s on—down to
Bacteria, viruses,

And us. That’s what sentience
Looks like at planetary
Levels—ideas managing

Homeostatic contests
Of microorganisms.
You’re the middle gets cut out.