You are what you think you're eating

A knife , fork and
a cracked plate
don’t constitute a meal ,
though all three items
are handy for show,

as are empty frames
on the wall when
there is any kind
of company visiting ,
who demand our attention,
taxes, documents of your legal rights,

you just say
it’s the wall you
wanted to highlight,
the frame is only a, well, a, well, uhhhh,
a framing device!

to bring a viewer’s attention
to the rub of the paint,
the embedded fingerprints,
the light switch in the center,

Likewise, it’s knowledge
we’re hungry for, isn’t it?
Knife , fork, cracked plate
are about the idea of eating
as others go without
forks, knives, or cracked plates…

Dead ethics professors
choke in non-intrusive urns
and French deconstructionists
blow kisses from
balconies and any perch
they can secure,

Appearances are misleading,
explanations are fiction
worth listening to for the
way the words wrap around
each other until it’s no longer
an announcer ‘s baritone
intoning the world in whole
but rather melodies flitting about
like nervous birds
trapped in a small cage,
a messy page of tuneless songs,

all this for a description
of my house that now seems
to rest on top of a giant hill,
bracing clouds and tree tops,

a form I’m filling
out asking me
to describe myself
and all the desires
I would bring into
the world if finances would allow,

I would allow everything is
what gets written,
and everything not forbidden
would be described
in the rhetoric of future tense,
when software rules the body electric.