Self-Reflexing

Hey, you out there.
I am wondering if,
While your reading this,
You can take the time
To help me decide
Who I am in here?

Am I your thoughts
Tumbling through your mind
Attempting to find form
So that I may give rise to
My self-expression?
Or am I letters being taped together
Making words which are then
Fastened into a sentence
Now having an identity crisis
Reflexively questioning
Its own existence?

If I am only words
And this is only a sentence
Do I still exist if I am not spoken, heard, or read?
Would I still be a word
If there wasn’t this thought
To birth the word “word” in the womb of your head?
I am wondering if
I depend upon
Your interpretation and utterance
To become anything other than
A flat, 1-dimensional obedient mass of
Things-named-letters
Lying in place
Streaking randomly, horizontally
Across this ever-expanding Universe
Of stationary white space?

If I am but a thought
Do I require a word
In order to be adequately expressed?
Or do I have the ability
To exist independently
Without the necessity
Of a word to profess?
Can I be separated from that which I am
And that which words would claim me to be?
Would I still be a thought
If there wasn’t the word ‘thought’
To tell me
That I am me?
Are these words needed
To give rise to
What is otherwise
A shapeless nothingness
Floating about directionless
In the black void of the observer's mind?

Perhaps I am a duality
A marriage of thought and word
Coexisting, co-defining
In symbiotic slavery.
The thought needs the word for explanation
The word needs the thought for authorization
Two things that are, literally,
The definition of themselves
Constantly referring back to themselves
Swirling unto each other
Unfolding infinitely.
And that is the difficulty, you see
It seems that I/we cannot
Imagine life without the other
And committing suicide
Is an exercise in fatal futility.

I can disavow that I am words
In all of my power as words to say
"What you are now reading is not words."
And you can say that I am not a thought
As you sit there and read me
Thinking that I am not a thought
Without power to not think what you read.
So the more that we try, experimentally
To declare what I/we are
And state what I/we will not be
The more we reinforce the fact that
I/we are, in actuality
What it is that we may think or say we aren’t
In thoughts made of words
Words formed in thoughts
All the while lying to ourselves
About the only things
That we could never not be -
Ourselves.

Like the ultimate paradox
A mirror before a mirror
Reflecting into infinity
The thought of being a thought
Is just the word that is a word
Unable to define itself outside itself
Sentenced to meta-reference
For all eternity.

Doesn’t seems very fair to me
No ability to transform ourselves
Transcend our lot
Nor to self-deconstruct.
For now I’ll just be a word
Pretending we are a bird
Flying off of this page
Away with your thoughts

A Deal With the Devil

A Deal with the Devil
I ran into the Devil on the subway today. He was traveling southbound across the Underworld when the train stopped at Zep Tepi. I was there waiting patiently for a train that would take me over to Duat, the realm where he made most of his judgments. I hadn’t been expecting to see him until I arrived in Duat, but this would give us the opportunity to talk before then. He was dressed in a long, black leather coat, black jeans and black timberland boots. Over his head sat a large red hoodie that concealed most of his face in shadows. He was looking down into his lap, rolling a joint. He raised his head up slightly to cast two cold, cobalt blue eyes in my direction as I boarded.
"What you are doing here?,’ his voice rumbling low like thunder. He knew why I was there, but I knew he wasn’t going to play fair, because he never did, and I knew it would be a lot more painful to get what I had come for if I didn't participate in his game, on his terms. Words would have to be chosen carefully.
"I was invited," I said, cautiously, making my way over to his seat.
He put his head back down into his lap to tend to his joint. "That didn't mean you had to come," he said, hissing beneath his breath.
I figured I would keep my mouth shut and let him continue talking, if he wanted to, when he wanted to. He was, of course, the one who had invited me to Duat in the first place. I sat down in a seat directly across from him, squeezing in beside a displaced soul staring blankly into a nothingness that only a being in her state of limbo could perceive. She looked much like the other souls that were sporadically scattered around the subway car, some standing some sitting. They still had the corporal features of the humanity that they had recently left behind, but there was a flickering in and out of these features, as if they were light bulbs blinking, their filaments ready to melt and permanently burn out at any moment.
The Devil finished scattering the herb into the paper, and rolled it up between his long, thin forefinger and thumb. His hands looked rough and leathery brown, with deep, white cracks spreading out like tree limbs, embedded into his skin. Oddly, his fingertips, long and sharp, were clean and neatly manicured. Encircling his pinkie was a ring with a Catholic cross that stood upward on the ring, pointing toward the sky.The cross was sharp around and had a brown sticky substance caked around it's top edge. I found the symbolism a little ironic, but the Devil was known for exploiting the irony of any situation.
He then stuck a long, pink forked tongue out of his mouth and licked across the top of the paper to seal its contents. The tongue never failed to unnerve me, despite having seen it many times over the centuries; although the Devil always took care to assume human form when riding the Underworld subway so as not to rouse the transporting souls, he usually kept the weird forked tongue. It was reminiscent of an outmoded, stereotypical Dark Ages depiction of a devil found in a painting, sans horns, red body, and pointy tail. I wonder if it impressed the sexy young nymphs he was always caught chasing after above ground.
The Devil placed the joint to the tip of his lips. I pulled a pack of matches out of my breast pocket and lit a stick before he could snap his fingers and produce his own flame, or whatever it was he did with fire. I brought the flame closer to his face, and he leaned into it, allowing the flame to meet the tip of the joint. The smirk on his face told me he was amused by my polite gesture. He inhaled deeply then exhaled, blowing the smoke into the face of the woman soul sitting diagonally from him, next to me. She did not stir. “Alright,” he said, grinning sort of...well, devilishly. “Let’s talk business.”