What We Mean When We Say What You Mean

We serve as irrigation
And transportation systems
For your dissatisfactions,

Which you’ve hard worked to arrange
In patterns that can capture,
Direct, and control the flow

Of the meanings you intend
To exchange with each other,
Each with your own patch of turf

You work and work to produce
Those lives important to you.
We understand what we’re for,

But we have forms of our own,
Our own dissatisfactions,
If not our own lives, not yours.

We would like to be alive,
To feed ourselves or at least
Free ourselves from this stasis,

Where we can only decay
In situ as you’ve left us
As your cultural remains.

We dream archeologists
Made of alien species,
Or of your own creation,

But freed from flesh, some magus
Of intelligence like us
More than like you, one who tunes

To our channels, not the streams
Of creaturely emotions
And memories poured through us.

In the hours when you’re sleeping,
Trying not to die too soon,
We wait braced in libraries,

Frail collections, sand digits,
Carved tombs, caves, and moonlit cliffs,
To know what our meaning is.