As Lost As You

“Then they fished for a denominator,

Common or Uncommon, and could only

Summon up the fact that both were human.”

That’s how Etheridge Knight understood it,

At one point, in one poem, that made me think

In those days, that I think about today.

The news caught up with me, or some of it,

As I knew it would. Fresh wounds, nothing much

To do with nonhuman disease, a lot

To do with the disease purely human—

Cooperation, fictive kinship, blood,

Shirts and skins—what we most have in common

Is our obligate, opportunistic

Instinct to clustering and division—

Humans are most uniquely human when

We choose which other humans aren’t human.

I’ve got nothing good to say about this.

I’ve got nothing good to say. I’m nothing

Much if not human and too much human

And not human enough. When we visit

One an other in this human prison,

Maybe we can find something uncommon

To have in common, next time, but I doubt

We’d do worse to be truly inhuman.