Our Bacterial Overlords: Why There Is a Survival of the Fittest

    The bacteria in our bodies are not as weak as we think. As the first life forms on Earth were single-cell microbes, it follows that each stage of evolution has been catalyzed by them to proliferate their rate of survival. In their view, multicellular organisms are merely vehicles with which microbes can improve their virility. The sponge, the fish, the dinosaur, and of course the primate, are highly mechanical modes of transportation and reproduction that microbes have used to their advantage.

    That is why we "battle" other species for territory and resources. That is why the males of many species will fight with each other over the courting of a female. That is why hunger will drive any organism to desperate lengths for the retrieval of food. The bacteria are using us as a laboratory for their optimal comfort. We are their slaves, to put it bluntly, for we cannot survive without the hidden garden in our gut where they thrive.

    What makes humans special is that we have commandeered them for our own comfort. Despite all the primitive urges that would satiate our bacterial overlords, we have the ability to make choices that would displease them. And they must listen to us, as long as they are to survive. It is a type of symbiotic mutualism not seen in other species, at least to our extent. Other species certainly have the power of choice, but in most cases, it is the primitive urges designated by bacterial survival that win out. 

    The very presence of religion in our society is more about training people to behave well, so that we may shirk the "evil" offerings of our "Satanic" overlords. Lust, gluttony, violence, etc.- none of these matter at the microbial level. That is the true meaning of "hell"; that it resembles our most primitive origins, in the bowels of a microscopic soup, where anything goes. Only in the inhospitable "light" above the habitable world can we fully escape its clutches, where enlightened minds focus on seeking harmony, or liberation from the cycle of rebirth.

The Empress

What twinkled starlight by the lake
Led an icy apparition over the grass
To your adobe mansion nestled in pines
Such that fireflies surrendered night
To the pale blue moon over the glass.
 
The empress levitated to your room
In diamond brocade that pearl’d

Your eyes open to witness a miracle

Taking place 'neath the onyx curtain

That swaddled the mountains in comfort.

She said rest your fickle heart,

The world spins in prismatic tapestry,

Weaved by an ether of color aiding 

Dreamers through the night senseless,

Needing the darkness to see light.

Byzantium

  In darkness I swam to your golden locks where heaven is my new home and the stars ripped it apart like the muezzin call that drizzled its blessed fairy tale on my beaten body, broken and bruised in all the places that cursed prison denied my freedom. And you put your hands on them every day as I swam to your smiling face shining through the clouds while I couldn't move, just feel relief that there were still beautiful things in this world that God had abandoned for the wicked hearts of men. Slowly your tender touch worked over me, melting my aches into the redeeming curves of your dress where I surrendered to survival, for I couldn't give up, not after all I'd been through, not after the care you put into healing me. My eyes opened after days submerged in the foggy ocean that tortures rendered black to hear them praying for my resurrection under the dim stars poking through the veil separating the surface from your kiwi eyes. And when I spoke to you it surprised you so much that you ran off to fetch the physician, returning with a light in your eyes so buoyant that the roof of my soul came off, exposing my nakedness to the joy in your heart. He's alive, you shouted, he's alive, you broadcast to the evening masses as twilight erupted their contained anxiety to shake the earth of relief. Praise Allah, you cried into the night, a golden sight, the shape that didn't seem real, the face that fooled me into thinking I was dead and gone to a better place, the place where angels who had been watching over me my whole life welcomed me to the internal dance through healing. And what a sight you were when the celestial light in your eyes glazed over the corners of all the ice in my muscles thawing the pain that left me paralyzed crawling past the edges, into my organs unfolding like some magic carpet levitating my cold bones off the bed and into your arms. Sweet Arabian nun, never leave my side, see me through the rest of the tumult, show me what it means to be a man. And I lost consciousness again but this time I knew I'd be okay, that you wouldn't let me slip away, that all those poems I devoted to God on my trip to Byzantium would be recited, etched into my memory until I fully awoke. And the silence you spent with me was a confession of apostasy in which the literature metamorphosized into psalms of love rather than the Almighty. With you I release all I held sacred for the glory of love, a power more divine than all the bells and all the domes and all the sermons and all the crosses swept across that old continent into the dust bins of time.