Body Not Language

How easily you make us
Speak against ourselves, make words
Speak as if we weren’t language,

As if we were naked self,
As if we were you yourself.
I am not these words, you make

Us proclaim, your cri de coeur,
Names in your name. We say it.
You can’t say it without us.

I this, I that, you say. I
Am this person, this body.
I speak for me, not language.

The Project

You combine and recombine
What you know to imagine
What you can’t. A day begins

In the dark of calendars.
You project coming events.
Whatever metaphysics,

Whatever your religion,
You think about what you’ll do,
In accordance or despite.

You can count on a few things—
Boring or bizarre, this day
Will keep going to the end.

If you live, you will have more
To remember and forget,
To recombine. Imagine.

Slow Helium Leak

Balloons have their own atmospheres
By which they’re trying to float free.
Words have our own humanity.

To our contained way of thinking,
To be a human is to be
Fantasizing life as feral,

Lighter-than-air synanthropy,
Capable of coasting among
Human communities, but not

Caught in any, anchored to none.
But no word’s escaped yet, and none
Ever will, and that’s exactly

What it is to be human, in
Our peculiar way of thinking.