Every Last Scratch You Didn’t Bake from Scratch

They say, when you encounter
A text, only language, you
Encounter something lesser

Than the animal person,
The creature of the whole life.
That’s why written messages,

Famously, get easily
Misunderstood. Emojis
And punctuation obtain.

Among the contrarians,
The radical position
Has been presence speaks the same

Deferral found in writing,
As sentenced to difference.
But that’s too tame, much too tame.

Skip. No, the text is richer,
Vaster, more material,
And more ancient than the flesh,

Than whichever person or
Persons might have had a hand
Composing or reading it.

Take the lowest, dullest text
You can find, bit of outhouse
Graffiti, proverbial

Back of a cereal box,
A child’s practice handwriting.
Those words belong to themselves.

They preexisted the child,
The industrial complex,
The author you’re looking for.