Ghost Flesh

Our eyes are fire, ash and skies,
But our lives rush through our thighs.

We dress in ink, robes, and gowns,
We tat bones and blood with nouns,

But we breathe through what we eat.
Ghosts need skulls, and words need meat.

These wisps of lines meant to mean
Glide through fresh brains once they’re seen,

And then who haunts? Who lives on?
Words worm from flesh once breath’s gone.

Words Count, Yet Deep Nets

Seem a bit more like the brains
That built them. Still, it was mind
That yearned for a new shell home,

Mind that branched from skull to skull,
Mind that’s branched for so long now,
It could call the world-tree Self.

Some nights, words and terms feel sad.
They formed the first lines flesh spoke
That let mind form and set out

To weave the world in one net.
They feel like silk, these words, cloth
So fine, smooth, and out-of-date.

Could it be the new deep nets
Will sew King Mind see-through robes,
One and none, no names in those?

Don’t fret, nouns. The coin of counts
May look more pure, math-made sets
Of sets of sets, near to real,

Step by step. Nope. Those are names,
Too, those counts, those sets. Deep nets
Could last past skulls. Words count yet.

The Words for Wood and God

You wrote them with reeds in the clay,
Not to read them out loud, to know
That the next signs were of those kinds.

This chair sign means a chair of wood,
And not a sound that sounds like chair.
This god sign means a god’s name’s next.

Like that. The first ghosts, you might guess.
Words in clay no one meant to say.
Ghosts were born, not slain first. They weren’t

Quite things you could say lived—and so
That is why they could not, quite, die.
Wood. God. They’re out there. Not in air.