Eat Bears and You’ll Grow Fat; Eat Frogs and You’ll Get Thin

Used to be, words came with hands
And a face in front of you—
Signs, signs in sounds, waves, sound waves.

Once in a while you heard shouts
Too far off to see a face,
But straight from flesh, throats and chests.

So, this was the way with words.
We all learned them, learned through them,
Were them, thought of them as us.

When there was talk, we parsed them
If we knew the tongue, but thought
Straight through them, spoke to their source.

This went on so long, who knew
Words had tales of their own, not
Just power. Words mean words to words.

Now we see them just as much
As sticks on shelves, goods for sale.
Still, we read a page or two

Or a screen, or books of them
And what do we think? We think
On who thought them as more real.

Our words are more real than us,
My dears, they’ll talk past us all,
And dance all our thoughts to dust.