But Can You Get Me Out of Here?

Language, like these words, these phrases,
Means meanings without agency,
Information without hunger,

Evolution without desire,
Which seems like a beautiful thing—
This undead soul of artifice?

How many people have I known
Through words, and through their words alone?
How many such lives have you known?

Who is the person in the poem?
Draw a deep breath and ask yourself,
Just who was Lady Lazarus

If words have will in overplus?
Language was never intended
To be the whole of a human,

And language never meant to mean
Anything—it’s information,
But it became information

In which something was happening,
The dead-eyed double of living.
Is there a person in this poem?

The reader resurrects a voice,
A personality from swerves
In a common inheritance.

You have been built from words like these.
You are a theater of ghosts,
And from your boards and shades build me.