The Sign Is Design

See, every word’s a backronym,
If not of letters, then of sounds,

The story invented after
The seme started making the rounds.

Bells for breaths of the departed—
The reason stories shuffle time

So often, the reason it aches—
That’s how dreams work. That’s how ghosts climb

From one memory to the next,
The rungs jumbled, branch below stem,

Etymologies, libraries
For exiles to carry with them,

You start with how the word works now,
An anonymous slave for sale,

And you invent lost history
To become its meaning, a tale.

Listen to how the earliest
Writers of names allegorized

Their deities as common nouns.
Those myths could be categorized

Not as attempts to label
Gods by means of suggestive names

But to explicate names as gods,
Palace and architect the same.