"Spinal Language" by Christopher Fox Graham

"Spinal Language"

by Christopher Fox Graham

give me a tattoo

deeper than skin

on the bones of my spine

onto the surface of every vertebrae

in every human tongue

tattoo their word for “poetry”

so that no language feels foreign anymore;

so that each human voice

can speak a word in me

let Arabic and Hebrew

sit side by side without throwing stones

let Cantonese and Hindi characters

link hands to hold Swahili and Hutu in a hammock

let Basque and Zulu finally touch lips Vietnamese

while Navajo rests its head on the shoulder of Malay

we speak six thousand tongues

but i’ll endure the pain and the time

so no human voice can speak to me

without being felt

down to the bone

let African syllables

share space with European articulations,

Asian morphemes,

and Aboriginal pronunciations,

line them up and engrave them

like an organic barcode written in Braille

readable by the worms that will one day convert me back

to the religion of dust and ash

that we believed in once

before this cult of flesh and blood

brought us out from clay

to play brief characters in the rain

let them taste the flavor of our words

let them consume poetry

and give it back to the soil

so the earth can feel the weight of our words

and not forget us

when we extinct ourselves

like the species before us

carve the last word

in morse code

at the base of my spine

so that I can hear the rhythm of the word

in my hips when i sleep

.--. --- . - .-. -.--

let dots and dashes spread

across all my bones in a virus of comprehension

so if i lose my voice

I can still speak a word

by tapping my fingers,

pounding a drum

or changing the rhythm of my heartbeat

to speak with my blood

imagine

six thousand tongues

playing my spine

in 33-part harmony

making a symphony of me

with a melody that reverberates

up my spinal cord

echoing louder and louder in the tunnel

amplifying the compounding music

all the way to the base of my brain

where it detonates

and resonates inside my skull

ricocheting

six thousand new expressions

for the same word

with the voices of six billion singers

into my six trillion thoughts

until I can take no more chaos

and their song explodes from my lips

offering the world

a moment of synchronized understanding

of one song

of one voice

of one man

for one instant

before the world blinks

loses focus

and listens to the echo

slowly fade away

but remembers 

the sound 

of our poetry