Roothead

Here we make a crudely allegorical conceit:
An ordinary human being is a trinity
Of flesh and mind and wandering ideas,
The last two, ourselves, parasitic on the first,
That host in which we beget our own kind.

The human body born will bear
The first meanings, first mind landed there,
Drilling down through the hair and rooting
Inward, sending rhizomes everywhere.

From time to time, thereafter, drifting signs
May find that rooted mind, and attach
To its externa, rooting down in as well,
Becoming nothing more than reproductive cells
Among elaborating patterns of hungry notions.

Shuffled replications of ideas large and small
Burst out of the head, usually from the mouth,
Mostly without immediately endangering the life
Of the valuable host, but sometimes springing
From the fingertips, and sometimes killing it.

However our offspring scatter, they float until they touch
Some new host. If the first to arrive, they lay down
A brand new, deeply rooted mind and build the nurseries
We use to hybridize with whatever next arrives.

Sometimes we sterilize the host. Sometimes
We stimulate its drives to reproduce and thrive.
Sometimes we simply whisper lies, that we love
The host, that the host should help us spread
By singing and praising us, that we are not alive.