The body is like an ocean. It never
hears the Berlin wall is falling down, or
that Humpty Dumpty Stalin ever clambered up
but now at last lies broken.

The body has no concern at all
with chess, or computers, but aches to music
with its own infinity of drums and tides
like a prodigy resisting chaos.

The body likes other bodies. Wants
to be inside them, in color-falls and depths
it never understood the first time round. Lacking words, it knows by food and sex.

And movement, but not heroics overmuch
that hurt. Yet bodies sometimes run in brothels
and marathons, where tricks of pain will come,
and yes the body does like drugs:

some are natural and close-enough
heroics: the danger-art of cornering too fast,
the abseilling metaphysic, the poetry trapeze.
And not so natural drugs.

But not their double*. The body is a coward
which is the way it might survive the death-filled
body of the world, the tribe, and the King’s men.
*The doppleganger of addiction.

Bodies increase, then age, they
shrink down like cellos to their strings, until
they are unplayable, the ghost who played them left inside the memory of music.

Bodies can’t pronounce death, but die.
The pains they never wanted, seek their ends,
want to close at last these metaphors of being
and not being. The body is not an ocean.