Ballad of Ernst Haeckel

Well this german I read
In a book thousand years wrote
And handled by thousand more dirty hands
Well when I touched it with my finger the pages fell to a dust
So I asked the librarian if she had a copy last
And she said ‘I never knew the touch of a warm man”
And she promptly laid her head in tears on the maple desk


Haekel, man who spoke a hundred voices(painter and taxonomist)
Sits on his table made of dead mollusks
Drinking his tea (collecting embryo)
And Recapitulates, life so pensively
Of those his ancestors lived before his own (ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny)

Taxon-mists
Well, they everclouding relationships
With their gene machines and cyborgs
Can’t tell which is which these days
“If they so geneticist, why don’t they see 
The mem'ry of gene history expressed 
In the fetus?”

Well these cyborgs, or men
Or whatever they are
They argued the poor man to a dusty death
And buried him ten feet under the shovel
With their rational claims too rational they be paradox

Embryonic slits are not gills and, do not function the same 
Those gills on men wont make ‘em swim
Your son tried it and drowned in your backyard swimming pool

Some hawk had the nerve to poke his eyes out
He, the person discover’d thousand species more
He, birth’d those words you spew out your hole
At every taxono-mists’ tea meeting!

Oh but haekel knew only too well
Those clowns had no foot on him,
He who discovered their entoprocts
which they sodomised every night

But there he was, haekel sitting loosely drinking his tea
And he found another word to his thesis
While all this happens in his mind
Those jokes can’t understand what poetry is, 
he says
When their momma’ never breast fed em any life

They live ten miles away from everywhere
And die there too,
Never knowing what a proper pen could be growing
With its ink

Poor clowns he thought
They’d never understand poetic license
Get arrested by objectiveness until
They remain a dried-up cyst

Oh, haekel write
That your book is loooong
That their shells i hard
Show em what you got
Thought they’ll never wake
Oh haekel write
Right you are, haekel
Haekel, write
With your octo-
pus Inc. all day.