Cutting Up

Typical of Burroughs, I guess,
To suggest the language virus

Entered us from deep outer space.
Earth never gets any credit

For its own creativity,
Never takes any of the blame.

It’s always the divine with us,
The planets and the aliens,

The one true God of the cosmos
In one of the many versions.

Metaphors for possessiveness,
Aggressive parasitism,

Have to be part of the virus
If metaphor is the virus.

You can’t cut and paste your way free.
There’s no drug to get out of that.

Here we are. Even if no one
Reads this, you’re still thinking with us,

And before you was someone else,
And before them and before them. . . .

And what if we’re just the planet,
And you’re how it talks to itself,

The way we can talk to ourselves?
First metabolism, then genes,

The vast unfolding tournaments
Of lives built out of lives from lives,

The circulatory system
Of the one-world organism.

True, that’s a metaphor as well.
That’s what’s fantastic about us,

You say us about something else,
You say it with us, and it’s us.