You Are Not Who You Can Touch

Put your marks and tokens together.
Marry your emblems to signs. It’s time.

Ask yourself exactly how many
People you know only in the flesh,

Never encountered once as symbols
Disembodied, airy messages,

Through some medium or another?
You’re all spiritualists now. It’s time.

And yes, these unpropinquitous days
Only make you realize how displaced

You always were, how voices and signs
And sometimes piercing whistles

Never were truly present, how words
Always conspired within deferrals,

Even whispers in the dark spreading
Rumors about what wasn’t then there.

It’s time. Time for you to space yourselves
More evenly around the planet.

Take your stations. Use your gifts. Relay
Your alternative realities

Made only of terms, links, and credit,
Your fairy worlds of numbers and trust,

Half a coin and half a knuckle bone,
Tokens of identity. It’s time

For you to step away from yourselves
As anything other than names. Time.