Lines of a Refrain Without a Response

Those long, interspersed, nuclear
Elements, types of transposons
Active in the hippocampus,
May be, right now, involved in this

Line’s composition and your own
Interpretation of these words,
Jumpy things, fine-tuned by the brains
Of people and octopuses—

Well, maybe not words, maybe not
For octopuses, but learning
And memory, sure, all that jazz.
The line between the inactive

Copies of mobile elements,
Your active, acquisitive thoughts,
And the words, names, and numerals
Used to encode the ways those thoughts

Encode the origins of thought,
Is hard to perceive, hard to trace,
Is thin and of questionable
Consequence, but likely exists.

Does this text have a specific
Function beyond cut and paste, print,
Copy, distribute? Can these lines
Dictate higher intelligence,

As it likes to define itself
In lines, like these, among humans
Convergent with octopuses?
To be answered by what’s not us.