I remember being told in school
On good authority
That the verb “to be” has no object.
But that was a lie.
Even as they were teaching this
They were proving it wrong.
I’ve been somebody’s object all my life
And lived the lie like all the rest.
I’ve also discovered
That if you summon all your courage
And refuse the places in their sentences
They get very scared
And work harder than ever to push you back
Where they need you to be.
And there’s so many of them out there
With their truth
It gets hard to resist sometimes.
These are the people who use love like currency.
It’s a having word for them,
A noun.
And these emotional capitalists
Have made a fetish of my life.
It seems to me
This planet is just so full of aliens
Who’ve lost their mother ship.
You just can’t trust them, they’re so unreal.
They’ve grown so accustomed to the heavy atmosphere here
That they have no strength, no enterprise
To try to build a replacement.
Captain Kirk, in his search for Spock,
Has been assimilated by the Borg.