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The Exquisite Corpse - A Journal of Letters and Life
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The Corpse Reads Classics

The Evolution of Panspermia
by Frank Eannarino


(Panspermia: here understood as "all things semen")

"When two men are fighting and the wife of one intervenes to save her husband from the blows of his opponent, if she stretches out her hand and seizes the latter by his private parts, you shall chop off her hand without pity."
--Deuteronomy 26:11-12

I.

The word "Testimony" comes from the ancient belief
that life was engendered by men alone,

so when swearing to tell the truth in a modern court of law
only the Bible replaced the scrotum as the oath-taking vessel,

for testicles, being the source of all life, the testicles were king,
and wombs for millennia were just baby carriages.


II.

Sarah accused Abraham of keeping her barren on purpose,
giving a son to her maidservant Hagai instead, as if Abraham

could impregnate at will, for it is God who commands
wombs to open or close on a regular basis,

so when in her nineties a child was promised to Sarah she laughed and laughed and 9 months later named her son Yishaq: "I laughed,"

and when the Lord reprimanded her unbelief, she recanted
(unsuccessfully) that she ever thought it was funny in the slightest.


III.

The Patriarchs had their progeny grip their venerable groins
to seal a promise, like Jacob on his deathbed required of Joseph,

translated as "If you really wish to please me, put your hand
under my thigh;," (1) as if we don't know what thigh could mean,

and Jacob blessed his son Judah, saying "The scepter shall never
depart from Judah, or the mace from between his legs (2),"

prophetic for Christians as Jesus is descended from Judah,
still walking softly but wielding a big mace, it would seem.


IV.

The Greek playwright Aeschylus, in 458 BC, maintained
in concert with his honored predecessors that a man

was still the only fertile pestle and a woman his mortar,
the "nurse for the young life sown within her,"

which may have prompted The Janitor Sam, in 1998, to confide
at work where he mopped the school district's halls, the night before

while he quarreled with his wife after forty years of marriage,
"I told that old hag 'you ain't nothin' but a cum catcher!' "


V.

Dutch microscopist Anton van Leeuwenhoek in 1677
said sperm cells were really human larva, "animalcules,"

and popular belief followed that a man shot his
microscopic homunculus, a miniature person,

into the womb of a woman whom immediately
began knitting rows of little pink or blue sweaters.

What courage had the pre-Renaissance man,
to go sans culottes and masturbate, believing

that generations of his descendants were literally
trickling down his fingers and inner thighs,

tiny gray rubber sons and daughters (envision them bald),
struggling enmeshed in a viscous silver webbing.


VI.

Darwin and Evolution were fun while they lasted,
going the way of the dodo and "luminiferous aether"

where light waves were once thought to be born,
just when women finally received recognition

as co-conspirators in the quest to populate earth
after their overlong gestation in the annals of genetics,

Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius, in 1905, said human life
comes from extraterrestrial sources, his theory that spores

travel interstellar distances in the cryogenic cold of outer space,
disputed because of bombardments of cosmic radiation (3),

no SPF 5,000,000 to protect the little wigglers,
until hunks of planet Mars yielded bacterial fossils in 1996,

so the seeds, in newer theories, ride meteorites and comets,
hiding in the crags from the flames of reentry,

and people now show up to watch meteor showers,
to egg on their progeny, to sigh as they ignite

in the upper atmosphere: "Grip those stones grandson,
you can make it you can make it you can make it."



(1) Genesis 47:29
(2) Genesis 49:10
(3) The work of Brig Klyce: www.panspermia.org

 

 

 

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the making and unmaking of person the corpse reads classics letters

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