Language As Armor Poem by Denis Mair

We are locked into the grip of collective fate. Bonds of giving and receiving are increasingly overshadowed by ideological bonds that line people up into camps. Such bonds are all the more tenacious because they are not accessible for adjustment by any single individual or fiction thereof. Also there is an enormous dissonance because now the language of camps is speaking its speakers, so we can't seem to get anywhere in it or with it. Like treading water or swimming in molasses. The motives behind language harden it to a carapace. Armor is bound to bash against armor, which is demoralizing for a person who knows language as a living instrument that once fell into his hands and cried out to be tuned. This was supposed to be our fruit because we don't have branch tips; we have phonemic tree structures on a column of air. We had to dig deeply because we knew we must use sturdily roots to uphold something so insubstantial. But the language of the camps has started it's campaign of not seeing, wielding it's death ray of ignoring the death died by others, vampirically flaunting the bigger death rays they'll use in the future, wanting us to feel what they have in store, a giant bile injection for everyone to digest. So we need some kind of superhuman vim to undergird our own realness.