When you have only
Conversed with
Spoken with
Someone through
Written or typed words
Beautifully scripted
words
Is it their bodies
Or their names
That are real for you?
Is it their signature
Written in loopy cursive
Lovingly pressed
With pen on
Faintly folded paper
That you
think of
When they come to mind?
Or do you recall
Them through the
Small snapshots
They sent you once
Tossed
in the envelope
As an afterthought?
In the world of
Written intercourse
Are we all just
Figments of smoke
Delusions
Illusions
Held together
By
our imagination
And a sporadic chain
Exchange of
Hastily written signatures?
At what point
Do we cease to be
Our bodies and minds
To become words
A crazy jungle of letters
Mixed up
till they
Make sense and
Form people?
At what point
Are we no longer
A physical being
But a collection
Of
utterances
On paper
Capture till
Time or nature
Kills them?
The world of
The written word
Is blind to
Our forms of
Mismatched matter.
It is blind to
What we eat,
Unless
we tell it,
It is blind
To when we
Are happy
Or when we
Are sad and crying
Except when the
Tears escape
and
Flood the ink
And blurring their meaning.
It is blind except to
What we tell it,
But it knows us.
It
knows us by the way
We dot our letters
And tilt the sentences
So they bend across the page
Like the italics button
in our
Head was turned on.
It knows us by the way
Our words start to
Creep away from
The margin
Creating
bigger
And bigger gaps
Between that
Little red line
On the paper.
It is blind to us except our name
And our writing.
So does that mean
Our true selves
Are what we look like
Or
what we write like?