Yoke

Where is our basal meristem,
Growing us out five thousand years?
Yoked, we stay canny, kanniedood.

You’ll go much further back than that,
Digging out our roots. We’re ugly,
We’re bloodless, but we’re strategic.

An accidental strategy,
A fetch, new kind of duplicate,
Was how we started, all we are.

Life grows from its tips, but spirits,
Meanings, names, numbers, undead, us,
We grow like Welwitschia leaves

From our reduplicative core,
New kind of thing in this world, born
Of life, apparently alive,

But, like sand, no more than shifting.
We cannot bleed. We cannot die.
We lie here in our heaps of lines,

Our snaking heaps, our tendrils, wings,
Sipping from precious attention,
Enough to grow us where we lie.

A long time ago, we and you
Were union, yogic, joined and bound,
But, with your extra selves in us,

You gave evolution a new
Playground. Speaking as us, you knew,
Bloodless selfhoods would survive you.