19    

hear news anchors then the bank     clerks adopt this accent the      next popular speech tactic 
arrives inarguable       now it’s personally yours       power penetrates bodies 

says Foucault to govern from       inside mostly soundlessly        you will soon hear us all used 
as history’s peculiar       alliance built simply of      its passage plus some friction    

caused by the indefinite     articles that any new       deception drags with it did
you think words were a way to     police yourself syllables     could be tamed with your counting 

thought you’d tempt what Keats left “light-       winged” in “some melodious       plot” to befriend your failure
to be more than fugitive      in the “shadows numberless”       you can’t just form subversive     

songbirds harmonically       transmitting “thou wast not born      for death” along the latest       
fiber optics to voice an      instantaneousness that’d       kin you to others in this 

brokenness to write what you      don’t know as if lyric hears     it




Previously published in Boston Review