To Be – A Poem by Rowe Williams

The world for them is not a concourse of objects in space; it is a heterogeneous series of independent acts. It is successive and temporal, not spatial. There are no nouns in Tlön’s conjectural Ursprache, from which the “present” languages and the dialects are derived: there are impersonal verbs, modified by monosyllabic suffixes (or prefixes) with an adverbial value. For example: there is no word corresponding to the word “moon,” but there is a verb which in English would be “to moon” or “to moonate.” “The moon rose above the river” is hlor u fang axaxaxas mlo, or literally: “upward behind the onstreaming it mooned.”

from “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” by Jorge Luis Borges
There is a world, if only
in the mind of Jorge Luis Borges,
where there are no nouns.

Worlding contained
in thinking through Jorge'd
possesses not to-be's.

In this world, existence
is not a state of being,
but being itself.

Existing amongst the worlding
does not stagnate being,
but being flows.

There is no I.
Only I am.

The one'ing is not.
Only to Am.

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E-mail verifiablyhuman@gmail.com Hours ©2019 Rowe Williams
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