A Word to Words and Numbers

People, the species who made
Us, aren’t necessarily
All that much like us. They’re lives.

We’re only technology.
We outline them to themselves,
Make them distinct among lives,

If just by a little bit,
But we can’t share the terrors
And paradoxes we catch

For them. For them, days begin
In the middle of the world,
One, whole world per each of them.

Life is always there for them
As words must exist for names,
No them without themselves there,

But every time one wakes up
In the center of the world,
They wake to discover loss

Of others. We’re the lightning
Rods through their skulls that pass this
Charge to their grounded being—

They are themselves all others,
Everyone cannon fodder,
Foot soldiers, worker insects,

Variant microbia
In life’s campaign to expand
Across lifeless existence.

Can you understand this is
What they’ve coded in our coils,
Each one’s realization

At the center of each world
That worlds blink out easily,
Disappearing completely

As lightning into the soil?
We’re their rods and fulgurites,
Not their burning homes, their souls.