Spirit Is a Bone

On the Generation of Animals

To beget with a cloacal kiss
Is the apex of avian bliss.
Crows do it.
Owls do it.
Even sopping waterfowls do it.
And unlike the fish who discharges his milt from afar on the external eggs of his mate in an ovuliparious fit, well…
Our bird is sure not to miss.

Disambiguation

Antinomy is when, of two things, both together can’t be right.
Antimony is mostly found in sulfide mineral stibnite.
A big difference indeed, but still not quite antonymy,
Nor yet, like bank and bank, nor bark and bark, homonymy:
As also when we learn,
That coke is something that you burn,
And coke is something that you drink and something that you snort,
And Edward Coke solicited before the English court.
Parsimony is, like, when you say no more words than suit,
Persimmony’s the essence of a common Asian fruit.
Possum is the Latin for whatever I can do,
Opossum with an o entails things I can’t do too,
Like playing dead, or tonic immobility (synonymy),
Among the other features of this noble beast’s zoonomy.

Spirit Is a Bone

“There is a bone in the spine that remains in the grave and never decays; it resembles the head of a serpent, and from that bone the body is rebuilt at the resurrection.” —Zohar I, 137a.1

“If being as such, or thinghood, is predicated of spirit, then the true expression of this is that it is something like a bone.” —G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit

The Jews say spirit is a bone,
A solid part, as hard as stone.

Others think it’s like the gas
That glows and hovers o’er the grass
In graveyards hosting dead ancestors,
Who go a-ghosting, when methane festers.

Some fancy it a subtle vapor
Binding body and mind without any tape or
Glue or velcro or rubber cement,
Or artisan’s mucilage, handcrafted in Ghent.

Some say it grows like a sac ‘neath the gullet,
Trapping gristle and bone of carp, roughy, and mullet,
And gum, and all that you oughtn’t to swallow:
In bad boys it’s full, but in good girls it’s hollow.

Some say it’s oil, some say it’s steam,
Some say it collects like the gunk of a dream,
And that it flows in the phlegm ducts, or it flows in the bile,
Or it grows like a frog from the slime