Composite

Concepts hover, tethered
To words and signs and skulls,
To terms, names, and numbers,

And we are all of these,
And no one kind of them,
And none of them at once.

The inert word is concept
As the gene fragment
Is a working protein,

More or less, and the skull,
The whole organism—
Living, eating, dying—

Is without one concept
If it has no language.
The same goes for numbers

Of social animals,
Societies lacking
Any sort of symbols.

We can’t be what we are
Without interactions
Between lives, signs, and minds,

Whatever nature’s ours,
Whatever selves we have
Are composite, restless.