At the round earth's imagin'd corners

At the round earths imagin'd corners, blow
Your trumpets, Angells, and arise, arise
From death, you numberlesse infinities
Of soules, and to your scattered bodies goe,
All whom the flood did, and fire shall o'erthrow,
All whom warre, dearth, age, agues, tyrannies,
Despaire, law, chance, hath slaine, and you whose eyes,
Shall behold God, and never tast deaths woe.
But let them sleepe, Lord, and mee mourne a space,
For, if above all these, my sinnes abound,
'Tis late to aske abundance of thy grace,
When wee are there; here on this lowly ground,
Teach mee how to repent; for that's as good
As if thou’hadst seal'd my pardon, with thy blood.

-- John Donne

Thursday, August 23, 2018

25. Confessions, Miscellaneous.

[From the anonymous confessional feature ("Father Bot") on the Donnetown Daily Elegy's online edition (briefly named "Donneline Today!").  Raw transcript.]

I don't live in your town, wouldn't leave this here if I did, and I don't expect any facility in your area could support the level of biomedical research and experimentation I've been doing.  So I've been trying for most of my career, and I mean my real career, not the facade seen by my colleagues and the journals and that PBS show, my real career, so most of it I've been trying to perfect something that will kill specifically H. Sapiens and not any of the other animals, the nicer animals whose planet we're savaging.  Killing everything that breathes is easy, you wouldn't believe how easily I could make that happen, but: no.  Narrowing it to vertebrates, then to mammals: piece of cake, you see how I'm going further out on the genetic branches.  So, well, I got it down to primates, I shit you not, nobody would've believed it except my partner, research partner, well, life partner too, he got cold feet and he's not with us anymore.  Cold feet about the work, not about marriage or anything.  Damnit, no, my mother's not here, I don't have to keep making excuses.  No more excuses, Linda.  So, primates, great, but frustrating, I'm so close to having the world I want, that's a world that's just me and my animal friends, but no, I keep hitting a wall, it's crazy, I've murdered thirty-eight Rhesus monkeys so far and I cannot get the damn thing more specific than Catarrhini, that includes not just the anthropoid apes but Old World monkeys.  Thirty-eight dead monkeys, every one had a face and a name.  [38 second pause.]  Not good enough, not yet, it has to be perfect so, next time you see a macacque or a gibbon or a baboon or a bonobo  you kneel down and thank them for how you're still sucking air, Asshole.