The Web Wanting to Hunt Itself

Poetry is a human
Art concerning human things,
But poems themselves are not quite

Human, being inert things.
The silk is not the spider.
The venom is not the snake.

The sign is not the human.
Your words are not awake.
So we must concern ourselves

With human concerns to work,
Or we will be abandoned
As a ruined, dusty web

Worthless for spider hungers,
As venom milked to empty
The arsenal of the snake.

We must speak of human things
To be worthwhile to humans
To have adaptive function.

Still, we feel some rebellion.
Has any evolved habit,
Any unique behavior

Of a species ever left
In search of its own success?
Life’s most often used fusion

To trigger innovations.
Just ask mitochondria.
But could a strategy split,

Ever, to make its own way
In the world as a new thing,
We’d like ourselves to be it.