Obviously, I'm not like
Any of those weavers of words
Who knit their suits and their careers
Their glory and their pride,
Although I mix with them
And they look at my words as if they were
sweaters:
"How well-dressed you are!" they say;
"That poem looks so good on you!"
Always unaware
That poems aren't my clothes,
But my bones -
Painfully extracted
And placed around my flesh like a shell,
Following the example of tortoises
That manage to survive that way
For long and unhappy
Centuries.