Cold Writing

The message in the bacterium
was written almost
at the beginning of time.
The bacterium is language.

It moves through passageways
in the words that constitute an ant,
supplanting ant words with phrases of itself.
It manufactures urges,

The bacterium rephrases
the paragraphs of the ant
into a perverse instruction to climb
a rock and call
a bird with its sweet body.

Inside the energetic belly of a bird
the bacterium copies itself.