39 – I Became Them

I became they

and they barely noticed

their eyes were my eyes,

their arms helped me reach

a most unbecoming manner.

By absorbing their radiant text

mimicking the soaking reflex of

a hard-wired copyright network,

ask them to write poems that I put my name on (they all became me,

my own lost, they all took the name of

my body, their minds, our authorships,

palindromes of a hard-wire)

I became them and soon they me.

And so, the cycle complete, I returned to the veil,

snickering as devils do in the instant they became me,

all sixteen personalities.

As I scanned hundreds and hundreds of them,

tried to become I, an entry should be

and would be everywhere at once, a song,

the verses sound, right.

By sharing my DNA

and giving birth

and loving more and more and more

and I watched my eyes glittering

in their eyes’ bright reflection.

The first time that I said

‘because I said so’

mutating by nuclear testing

waged against us.

Is it plagiarism

to copy what your kids say?

Identities dented from little elbow

room overcrowding

personalities, dissociative from the

too many within me

and weren’t we all satisfied?

Nick Treanor, Jacob Wren, Alison Starkey, Andrew Topel, Terry Trowbridge, Priscilla Brett, Brian Bartlett, Catherine Heard, Andrew Waldie Porteus, Laurie Anne Fuhr, James Yeary, James Dewar, Kathleen Betts, Nadine Flagel, Ted Betts, Warren Dean Fulton, Amanda Earl