Round Table

What does it mean to be solid?
It is only, he says, a linguistic certainty.
We've decided what it means to be, that thing,
Solid
and so it is. We are all solid. This table-
It's solid too.
If every human on earth died,
This table would still be here.

I feel like I'm dying.
I'm the only girl around this table,
Silent queen at court
While the four of you
Fight ancient battles with
Contemporary weapons.
As you spar,
I am bleeding.

I don't want to be silent,
But I ache like a lop-topped tulip.
I want to lie down in the dew,
A catkin beaten from the poplar
With a stick.

Science is necessarily analogy, he says-
There's no explanation, nothing beyond the
Words we use to make it real.
I think I can get behind that.
My whole life is analogy.
My thoughts are nothing beyond
The words I use to make them real.
I am only as good as my next verse,
My varied thoughts are only verbs.

I curl up slightly, feeling like decay:
Burning leaves, papery dead rose-heads.
I seep, perchance to dream,
Dry but weeping,
Like an old lady, with tears or cataracts.

For us to interact with something,
It needs to exist, he says.
Now then, around this table,
I must be ether.
But then I remember,
Interaction is more than words.
In the silent world, I am reigning.

The pen, when it falls upon the table,
It thinks that the table is solid.
It doesn't fall through.
The pen doesn't think!
This is the mistake men have made for millennia.
The pen does as its told,
and if I told him the table wasn't there,
He would fall through, for sure,
and we'd read all about it.
Then there'd be truth in that,
Wouldn't there?

While they are talking,
My womb is squeezing out
The abject me.
The negative of me.
The clotted part of me that will not be.
I'm so sore, so sore I can't speak
So I pick up the solid pen and take notes.
When I'm well again,
I can use this too, too solid pen,
To say my piece.

What does it mean to be solid?
This is something that only a man can ask.
I will never be solid
While there is this hole in me.
It will always be hard for me to speak.
I will always be reminded, monthly,
Of the melting of my flesh.
I do not know what it means to be solid,
and this is why I will never be a scientist,
and this is why I will never be a man.