In The Next Parallel World Poem by Stephen Bennett The Playjurist

In the next parallel world
it would be
the written and/or
published poems that live.

They homestead upon their
pieces of paper.
Some are in cities, walled in
leather. Some of them

in card board, card stock,
cloth or fine paper,
and the cities
where most of them are

gathered on shelves...
states with not much government
except
for the alphabetical order of authors,

(not an actual working life form there)
or by their similar
concepts or ideas.
And the shelve states stand

above and beneath each other
and the order
established on any shelf usually
extends up and down through the case.

Other poem's paper homesteads
are strewn all over
the parallel planet land,
sometimes in more rustic bounded forms,

sometimes in transient possibly
temporary shanty
towns. Some must homestead napkins
or envelope backs. Some

it is rumored, live the life
of the parasite. Some say
they all start this way hosted
in the meat of some dying carcass.

They say some never get out.
Those that make it
to homestead existence live
quite slow, long healthy lives,

like the cold blooded snakes
in our world here,
who eat
every third week, these forms
of life do so, so rarely that it is never


seen. In their lives they
simply live,
exist, feel and think... and believe
in another layer of being they can't know

understand or see. But get a kind of
evidence. In their gentle
peaceful happy
thought-looped repeating minds.

Once in a while the intrusion
of something quite other
than what they each are
rushes suddenly upon them.

As their defense they play dead
on their homestead
and make prayers into the unknown
declaring their love and gratitude

for what they are and asking
of what they can only
assume to be part of the larger
universe...

as they present the identities
of their personal beings
they ask, "Who
are you, and what do you want? "