H e a r t S o n s & H e a r t D a u g h t e r s of A l l e n G i n s b e r g

N a p a l m H e a l t h S p a : R e p o r t 2 0 1 4 : A r c h i v e s E d i t i o n

ANTLER

How Can It Be?

How can it be a zygote invisible to the naked eye

creates a full-grown human being

3 million times larger

with 60,000 miles of blood vessels inside them?

60,000 miles of blood vessels per human

means if you walked 10 miles a day every day

it’d take 17 years to walk that far,

60,000 miles of blood vessels per person

means a single person’s blood vessels laid end-to-end

would circumference the Earth almost twice,

40 people’s blood vessels put end-to-end

would stretch from Earth to the Moon

and back,

7 billion people on Earth

means 420 trillion miles of blood vessels

for all the people on Earth combined,

And if all the human blood vessels alive

were put end-to-end

they’d stretch from Earth to the Moon and back

210 million times,

And if at any given second 25 trillion blood cells per person

times 7 billion persons on Earth

equals 175 sextillion blood cells

per all Homo sapiens combined,

And if each blood cell lives only 120 days

yet circulates through the entire circulatory system

300,000 times

That means each red blood cell travels

60,000 times 300,000

equals 18 billion miles total before it dies—

a distance from Earth to the Sun and back 1000 times—

and to walk 18 billion miles

walking 10 miles a day every day

would take 5,206,000 years,

And all inside a being

5 feet 10 inches high

2 feet wide

1 1/2 feet thick!

How can this be? How can this be in a Universe where

99.9% of the mass of our Solar System

is the Sun

and 99.9% of an Atom

is empty space

So if you took away

all the empty space

between the electrons and nuclei

of all the atoms of the Earth

the planet that remained would be

only 100 miles wide,

and the actual size of a person

once all the empty space is removed

is the size of a poppy seed?

[Originally published in NHS 2011, http://www.poetspath.com/napalm/nhs11/.]