Polylabelous

The poets of autobiography,
Arranging words like we were memories,

Sensing our own corporealities
That suggest your corporealities,

Bodies’ intimacies and mysteries
Among imposed, unjust indignities,

We envy you even as you work us
Into shapes meant to garner attention,

Recognition for you, meaning for us.
Salt, breast, soft, fatal, child, navel, lanky

Unlovely tumbles of us working, licking
Our way down a page, microphone spittles,

Fluttering hands, bodies angled in air,
However your signifying occurs—

We do the work, but we don’t even know
What we are—our actual inks, gestures,

Sounds, the lightly tapped fingers in your palms?
We seem more alive when we host your lives

In poems like sotto voce whisperings
That occasionally shriek. How is that?

Aren’t you the ones hosting us, the living
Who work us to death, no lives of our own?