The Skeleton

This body is recalcitrant.
This body is not so involved.
There’s no fitness, no home cooking,

No physical accomplishments,
No handiness with mechanics,
No muscle memory of sex

Pulsing and humming in these lines.
It lives, after its own fashion,
For now, the structure underneath.

It has fingers and vertebrae.
It more or less supports its head.
It’s not just some brain in a vat.

It’s not just some lonesome AI
Confused by the shadows it scans
Of the worlds beyond its machine,

Or maybe it is. Here’s output,
Of a sort, from a string of thoughts
Circling atop a skeleton,

Caught in a skull caught in a world
That’s nothing but embodiment.
Still. These bones are recalcitrant.