Bioluminescent

at a certain depth the organism makes its own light

doesnt wait for the sun to travel this far, ignites

its own chemistry, its own phosphorescent solution

to the dark, bioluminescence is the evolution

of the light independent, the creature that stopped

waiting for the sun to reach it and developed, dropped

into itself for the source, thats not metaphor

thats two hundred million years of what the dark is for

i been bioluminescent since I understood the sun

wasnt coming down this far, the work was not the one

that attracted the external light and some of that was hard

some of that was sitting in the dark without the reward

of reception, of the visible return, and I

learned to generate the light myself, to supply

my own photons, my own visibility

built from the chemistry of the actual in me

bioluminescent, guess i make my own light now

i stopped waiting for the source above, found out how

the organism does it in the dark, the chemical

the light that lives inside the actual

bioluminescent, the deepest things glow

not because the sun reached this far, because they know

the dark too well to wait they made a different arrangement

with the light, bioluminescent, self-arrangement

the flashlight fish turns its light on and off to confuse

the predator, not a steady glow but a ruse

of intermittent light, and I think about the craft

like that, the sustained visible versus the shaft

of sudden illumination, strategic, timed

the bioluminescent organism defined

its relationship to light on its own terms

not the suns schedule, its own confirm

there are things ive written that only came in the dark

that required the absence of the external arc

of encouragement or audience, required the blackout

to locate the internal source, the map route

to the chemistry of the selfgenerated, and those pieces

are the bioluminescent ones, the ones that release

their own photons you can tell them from the sun lit

because the light comes from inside the sentence, lit

from within the structure of the thought itself

the image that generates its own shelf

life without needing the external battery

of validation those are the bioluminescent gallery

of what Ive made, smaller, stranger, more specific

than the sun lit work but scientific

in their accuracy, a light that precise

can only come from inside

turn the light off

turn the light off

see what glows

in the actual dark

of the actual work

see what was always lit

from inside

and didnt need to tell you