[A Poem inspired by Covid, CRISPR, and Uber drivers]

Ubiquitous utraquistic

Everyman, Jack-of-all-trades,

master of none, born

between Gen-X and Y2K;

skipping fickly from one

strand to another, promiscuous

and Promethean in dour

grinning grim-faced

gigolo-like work.

Excellent in its underdog job.

*

Dandy, punk, yob, digging up and dishing out

dirt. Tagging off and turfing out shit.

Done up to the harlequin nines,

sweeping, cleaning, clearing up

sorting, drawing, dragging out,

tearing, putting, breaking down,

getting through and by and around;

cajoling trans to cis and back;

happy hanging out around nucleus

and microvilli and organelles;

shepherding oocytes and apoptosis,  

rocking babes in cribs, shrouding the dead,

ubiquitin always gets the gig.

*

Telephone operator, wielder of

Solomonic sword, signalman,

scribe, air-raid warden, fire-fighter,

nurturer of fruit in the womb;

maker, keeper, winder-up, repairer,

of watches and clocks. Cogsmith,

grandfather, cuckoo, grim reaper,

bearer of babes and arms. Harbinger

of doom. Swiss Army knife

of complexes and molecules.

Whip-cracker, share-cropper, master,

dealer, trader, bondsman, serf.

*

In the Chronicles of ubiquitin,

homo sapiens and brewer’s yeast

are kissing cousins—human souls

a bad off-batch

–a foul experiment gone wrong.

More dead wood in the family tree.

*

In the time of ubiquitin, the élan vital

has made but baby-steps

through emptiness. In the light-years

ubiquitin spans, intelligence

is but a handful of bytes, a few bits

and bods in a cytological bag, urging us out back

towards the stars.

*

Ubiquitin is the alien

knitting within…