Permit

If I were to confine myself
To only what occurs to me
As this body in this moment

Words surfacing from memory
Descriptions of the thoughts I have
Descriptions of the things I see

Episodes only I recall
Experiences I have had
I and the people most like me

Would you say I came by these lines
Appropriately honestly
Nothing filched without permission?

I wouldn’t say any such thing
Every phrase an infant captures
The slang an in-group slings and bends

The capacity to render
In every last sense of render
Any kind of living in words

Even for Enheduanna
Even for apocryphal bards
By headwaters in the mountains

For anyone for a long time
Longer than language itself
Can recall at all of itself

Is something borrowed bent and broken
Hammered and battered hand-me-down
I didn’t live any of this

Whether I ever read a word
Of English or any language
Whether I invented or sang

What I heard someone older sing
About being of this body
This inheritance by the way

Where I am sitting and watching
Tourists seek out experience
To capture in trucks or on foot

Or pedaling furiously
Or gunning down ATV trails
With guns and coolers in back

About how this body perches
Between them and all the other
Earth activities of the day

The big ravens and small sparrows
The ants and fungus underground
Clouds and winds wandering around

Knowing none of this existed
Exactly before in these words
That pre-existed all of this

All arrived here only lately
With fresh dishonest honesty
When the nothing of this was me

Who never lived any of it
Hiding in words like a hermit
A squatter without a permit