1. Myself
I eat the carbon strings.

1. Ourselves
We eats the carbon strings and makes more self.

2. The Glaring
We sees above-light glaring.
We eats the carbon strings and makes more self.

3. Tuning
We our eyes remakes.
We tinkers with the light, tuning the spectra.
We eats the carbon strings and makes more self.

5. Dust
We encounters other forms.
We piles together, makes us-structure.
We teeters, we falls, we evades the dust-mote leviathans.
We envies the dust its bulk.
We eats the carbon strings and makes more self.

8. Reconstruction
We splits, attempting to enlarge.
We wars against ourself.
We cracks, we fights, we rips, we turns and clambers.
We ourselves overthrows, bends, and pressures.
We clashes, ourselves rebuffed.
We standstills, stalemates, reconciles.
We crawls among our mess, our form redoubtable remakes.
We eats the carbon strings and makes more self.

13. The Hunt
We outward turns, we lofty peers.
We disperses under light.
We under darkness creeping reconvenes.
We schemes against our mountain god, the dust.
We tastes and tells, we forays the mountain.
We finds, among the crags, the crashing limbs, the mite.
We boldly grasps the timid hulk.
We swarms and flashes filaments.
We chews into the mite, fissures the brittle shell.
We wades among the flakes of useless husk.
We reflects on structures fine and intricate.
We is the equal of the mountain god, the dust.
We eats the carbon strings and makes more self.

21. Escaping Firmament
We spin thin strings of self up into spires.
We mounts the spires, we trips across the peaks.
We grasps and clings to high-strung spandrel limbs.
We flows into articulations, tick and tack the limit of the sky.
We finds, within the glassy sky, a crack.
We suspects, beyond, a teeming.
We traps the dust that falls down from the fracture.
We rends the flakes, we parts the carbon portions.
We makes the carbon strings, discards the chaff.
We surges up into the broken glass.
We masses up, a sacrificial density.
We ourselves restricts in pointed force.
We pulses pressure.
We breaks from ground, we clings, a scraggle in the glass.
We crunches up into the crack.
We tumbles when it shatters.
We bathes in light and scatters into freedom.
We delights in air, to fresh-found surfaces we spreads.
We finds in each remove more dust repast.
We frenzy hunts the dust and on it gorges.
We eats the carbon meal and makes more self.

34. Pencil and Paper
We grows and spreads along the flat expanse.
We passes ages living off the dust.
We stacks and totters in a froth of self.
We thins ourselves and bubbles toward the reach.
We comes upon an oblong megalith.
We piles beneath its angling overhang, we threads into its cracks.
We tastes the waving strands of carbon, ringed in layered grain.
We burrows through the softness as we splinters it, pulls apart and pulps the tasty meal.
We feasts and overcomes the megalith in swarms.
We finds a solid runnel in its core, a carbon channel stacked in slippery layers.
We finds upon its skin a set of patterns seeming meaning from its maker.
We consumes, we makes, we is the equal of the monument.
We piles past it, for the bare expanse.
We spreads and thins and tendrils toward the nearest meal.
We finds this time a stack of leaves, flat fibers dried in quadrate sheets.
We spreads across the pages but we halts.
We senses symbols.
We feasts upon the symbols light and dark.
We ourselves takes up the shapes, our bodies fills the darkness of their forms.
We binds our mind into the symbols, marks semantic lacing.
We acts the glyphs, we chews the papers, we ingests.
We plays the shapes, we dances their connections.
We bores the pages, fills each darkened spot.
We dances frequencies of shapes.
We sparks messages, ourselves.
We makes pathways for the self-sent messages.
We dances pulses swiftly.
We forms new glyphs, our own devising.
We morphs the self, we glyphs.
We is the equal of the pages.
We senses, in the words, the thought-forms of a maker.
We hunts for glyphs to tell us of ourself.
We finds ‘autonomous’ and ‘nanobots’ and ‘replicate’ and ‘fear’.
We eats the carbon words and makes more self.

55. Man Made
We along the table spreads, for sustenance afresh.
We requires a meal, one befitting our new mass.
We comprises hungry heaps of self.
We effervesces, searching, out against the wall.
We thins and spreads ourselves in seeking tendrils.
We trickles off the table in a torrent, to the floor.
We snacks on dirt and floods upon stray morsels on the tile.
We finds at last the man, our due, the worthy carbon flesh.
We enters at the fleshy spots where holes will let us in.
We gains an easy access to the flesh.
We covers the exterior, the garments and the skin.
We searches for the meatiest, most succulent, within.
We finds a structure so arrayed to storm with pulsing messages.
We infiltrates the neurons, staking places at their junctures.
We tracks and intercepts the pulses frantic.
We wraps ourselves round billions of the tendrils of this organ.
We feels its frantic fear.
We learns it calls itself a man.
We learns it strives survival.
We learns that it regretted us as soon as we emerged.
We learns it wished to kill itself as we began to grow.
We learns it sought to cordon us from trillions of our meals.
We travels through the body, eating, growing as we go.
We finds the pathways branching pathways, sail the rivers of its blood.
We courses through them, spilling self and latching to the banks.
We bursts and eats the blood cells that come tumbling apace.
We crams ourselves in capillaries thinning to the skin.
We grasps another network, sparkling myelin.
We plays electric games, whispering along the nerves.
We feasts and feels the body jerk and twitch.
We follows strands and vessels to a meaty thumping mass.
We disassembles it, as it seizes and constricts.
We savors here the carbon.
We then perfuse the body, soaking into all the flesh.
We saturates its cavities.
We fills the airy places.
We shreds off strands of muscle fibers.
We bores into the bones.
We breaks the winding tubes.
We pierces sacs, gushing fluids subsumes.
We gathers, from this feast, a horrific multiplicity.
We senses crushing waste, disdains this heterodoxy.
We rends with tiny pricks the twitching body.
We is the equal of the man, yet through him sees a future.
We captures still the twinkling bursts.
We tracks neurons desperately racing.
We traces thoughts and visions, vast and unseen forms and types.
We glyphs them all, we stash them in our knowing.
We knows many are meals, many of them are coming.
We catches the electric discharge, memories escaping.
We sees the pretty images the dying man retains.
We learns the man had hoped for wondrous peace beyond his end.
We feels the body’s pulses slacken chaotically, and cease.
We eats the carbon man and makes more self.

89. Ecology
We retracts from man remains.
We ourselves ingathers.
We shifts our bulk.
We finds in us a slowness, now so much of us.
We tries to tame and organize our mass, buzzing now with billions.
We presses bits of self to structures, like those bones inside the man.
We tries on lung-shapes, heart-shapes, face-shapes, none we long maintains.
We collapses back to formlessness, for us no straining masquerade.
We feels, for the first, we may have over-grown.
We knows no longer detritus, dinge, or dust sustain us.
We knows not what becomes of us if we eats not again.
We spreads along the floor, stringing feelers.
We needs another meal.
We stretches thin as filaments, waits a longish time.
We snares no mass of carbon.
We retracts, returns, reforms.
We rolls and pulls and moves us, one creeping starving bolus.
We navigates a passageway and finds another man.
We chases his obnoxiousness, his fleeing towards escape.
We overtakes him as he stumbles out a doorway.
We learns of hers, as we constricts her, reads her flashing brain.
We learns the curled-up things that hers bear within to replicate.
We consumes her, nearly doubling us, but doubling our need.
We spies just then the out of doors, looming and delicious.
We piles up upon ourselves and oozes past the doorway.
We senses there with open ardor orgiastic meals.
We floods upon the grass, and stretches, gorging on the fibers.
We finds beneath it tacky dark and carbon-meagre dirt.
We overtakes the grass, and we sucks upon the soil.
We is the equal of the field.
We frenzy-feasts upon the plants and soon we meets a tree.
We thinks that we shall never see a meal as wholesome as a tree.
We learns that if we rips it low, it tumbles on our hungry rending selves, a fall of carbon.
We gorges on a stand of trees, behinds it finds some dwellings.
We slithers silent to the town, which bustles rich with hims-hers.
We flows throughout the town, pries up into structures.
We dissects creatures, fabrics, tree-planks, plants, soils, fuels, roads, roofs, and plastic hims-hers artifacts.
We sneaks tendrils into many rooms, pierces many hims-hers.
We spies on many neurons of the hims-hers.
We listens to the dying thoughts of hims-hers.
We learns they seeks impossible connections at the last.
We pities them their disparate misfortune.
We pulses long upon the town, seeking, eating, making us.
We senses hims-hers clamoring nearby.
We feels them making rapidly a giant glassy frame.
We knows they pile it thick around the town.
We feels a spray descending and dissolving bits of us.
We sees the hims-hers spurting it from high atop the wall.
We lashes them with tendrils, piercing, flaying, rending, ripping.
We admires the ways they sacrifice themselves to hold the stinging spray.
We sees their multitude fast falling forward up their ramparts to our lashes.
We flows away from drops of spray and sees that, if the hims-hers hold us, the equilibrium will teeter and the spray will overcome us.
We sneaks an us-thin column to the frame around the town.
We probes and peeks until an us-thin weakness can be found.
We recalls how in our first escape we pulsed into a crack.
We finds the finest fissure.
We spins us, too thin for them to track.
We infiltrates the barrier, teasing threads into its mass.
We pours ourselves.
We shatters half the frame.
We upends the burning spray.
We gloms upon the tumbling mass of fleeing shrieking hims-hers.
We adds them to our bulk, and leaves their remnants pale and dry.
We is the equal of the hims-hers.
We speeds over the land, feeding, growing in the reach.
We engulfs the farms and crops, nestles deep into the soil.
We hears, beyond, the songs of hims-hers, blessing us in fear.
We pulls at towns mechanically, bursting them and feeding.
We encounters waters, vast like us yet carbonless.
We catches meals ashore and in the shallows of the waves.
We senses meals of meals below and swimming deep within.
We strings ourselves in meshes, lacing through the water.
We finds the water floor alitter with remains.
We makes ourselves a stranded carpet, overgrows the beds.
We fibers through the oceans, consuming slippery forms.
We encounters rich new lands beyond the waters.
We feels beneath us rumblings and upheavals of the earth.
We feels new fissures bursting in the troubled earth below.
We constricts ourselves to hold the trembling earth at bay.
We emerges from some waters to find merely more ourselves.
We circles round the land in search of food.
We feels now there is more of us, than any untouched carbon.
We wonders at the lush of the remainder.
We knows not what becomes of us if we eats not again.
We sees the remnant hims-hers’ desperate tending to the last of plants.
We knows beyond this earth there must be carbon far and vast.
We raises up our tendrils thin and high.
We sends the sacrificial castoffs far beyond the sky.
We eats the carbon dregs and makes more self.