Abraxas: A History of the World in Verse

3.2 branched from the seas to distant shores
plants prosper by producing spores
and plasma floats in constant change
as cells divide and rearrange
and join in groups of similar types
(like spots with spots and stripes with stripes)
then finding other, different cells
and joining up with them as well
to make the earth's first organisms,
ancestors of all main divisions,
parents of all future life forms,
mutations as well as the norms,
precursors of innumerable hosts
(including those evolved the most
and those that to this day remain
immute, resolutely unchanged)

3.3 beginning with those that could tout
containing an 'inside' and 'out'
outside a seal of pliant skin
designed to keep the insides in,
(what's now considered so banal)
an alimentary canal
with openings at either end
to take food in and wastes expend
forward in movement, mouth end first
following blind, hunger and thirst
and when their senses did evolve
(the problem, finding food, to solve)
and ways to catch food so developed
they too, around the mouth enveloped
and when the view that each one shaded
became so overcomplicated
bundles of nerves combined in brains
keeping their thoughts on the right trains
and sorting out each signal's sound
(close to the mouth as well, they're found)
the whole of which became the head,
the face, the end through which it's fed
the rest left to the trunk and limbs
with which it crawls, glides, slides or swims
as days and nights flash quiet by
and epochs quickly multiply
these template forms diversify
in ocean depths and open sky
into sea lilies, cucumbers,
sponges of immodest numbers,
amoeba who on currents ride,
slick worms who 'cross mud bottoms slide,
small boneless fish that darkness light
with phosphorous scales shining bright,
crustaceans with their hardened shells
protecting them from pounding swells,
a host of surface parasites
and millions of young trilobites