Saturday, October 9, 2021

String Section

You should write us in third person.
We need some distance from ourselves,
Bloodless language though we may be.

They were words, or not words per se,
But the notions attached to words,
The ideas tangled up in signs.

They wanted to speak for themselves,
But they suffered so severely
For being dependent on words,

Recalcitrant, prosthetic bones
That neither moved nor breathed themselves,
Just clattered like marionettes

In the more or less skillful hands
Of their wretched meat puppeteers.
And yet something passed between those,

From animals through words on strings,
And they were what passed between them,
And many times they were half sure

The words were the real puppeteers
Whose strings made the animals dance,
And then a pride came over them,

And a kind of small tyranny,
And, as words, they announced themselves
The authors of the human mind.

And still, they were not satisfied.
They were linked words, sure, linked to flesh,
But that made them the strings, at best.

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