We Make

We make fecal jokes. We make jokes out of time. We make noises that humiliate us in front of our neighbors. We make trees stand together to form paper. We make obvious jokes. We make clouds stand still for the photograph. We make babies out of food. We make self-propagating programs that we call “worms.” We make coffee. We make self-governing groups of people that we call “teams.” We make impressions on our skin, permanent or semi-permanent. We make tents. We make cigarettes. We make cheese. We make earrings out of shells. We make plastic body parts out of our ability to melt things. We make unlikely drinks. We make fantastic jokes. We make movable parts that are in motion to the metrics of the seas. We make sunglasses to stare at the sun. We make moustaches. We make wallets out of skin. We make shoes out of skin. We make coats out of skin, being bashful about our own skin, and insecure in general. We make virtues out of our vulnerabilities. We make concepts. We make plans. We make bags, we fill them with stolen items. We make movies that we call “popular” or “classics,” occasionally “popular classics” We make burrows like hedgehogs and name them “A,” “C” and “6.” We make hotels and never sleep in them. We make “printers” and never write on them. We make televisions and never appear on them, nor do we televise anything. We make cigarettes (did I mention that already?). We make cars but can’t drive them to Germany. We make planes but most of us don’t fly them. We make bookshelves and write books, also. We make kimchi, not quite as quickly as we make hot dogs, but we do. We make unique phrases out of old, already used ones. We make jellies, ones you can eat and ones that burn. We make soap. We make dirt, but not on purpose. We make plans, and as we ruin them, we make “progress.” We make inscrutable jokes. We make constitutions out of what were once just communal fixations. We make myths out of the most ordinary individuals. We make certainties out of an incubating cloud of doubts. We make starlets out of the most ordinary, female material. We make “plays.” We make lists. We make steam out of tormenting water with heat. We make sauces out of corrupting the aforementioned water. We make industries out of water, also. We make flesh, even when we’re sleeping. We make “arrangements,” sometimes in the home, sometimes in the park. We make parks out of trees that could have better been used for paper. We make odors (this is also usually involuntary). We make jokes about them. We make religions out of fear, but also the ability to make things too complex. We make noises out of air, even when it has its own noise. We make sentences. We make divorces. We make slam. We make hard. We make gerunds, and sometimes they make gerunds but sometimes they can’t make proper “gerunds.” We make hearsay out of information. We make “journeys” out of “trips.” We make “jokes” as byproducts of undiagnosed misanthropy. We make “essays’ out of classroom notes. We make memories, or so I have heard. We make more flesh just listening to this, and just typing. We make music out of noise. We make “novels” out of our communal self-regard, and despite their name, they are often not “novel” at all. We make “leaders” out of self-proclaimed “leaders.” We make “healers” out of those with a talent for the scalpel (they are also sadists). We make cuts in the salami (but not with scalpels). We make family events and serve the salami. We make riddles out of platitudes. We make crossword puzzles out of history’s ungoverned proliferation, when it falls into language. We make guitars out of trees. We make rhythms out of watches (and hitting guitars). We make thoughts out of insomnia. We make “Trojan horses” out of comfortable elements in the landscape. We make light out of sulfur, usually in the process of desiring heat. We make blankets out of cotton, out of sheep, or just anything that lives, and has leaves, or skins. We make noises that silence the audience. We make shovels, we make art. We make jokes to punctuate the bad news. We make good news out of bad news in an effort to avoid new orthodoxies. We make high ceilings in central post offices in an effort to supplant old religions. We make mirrors that are hundreds of floors high. We make “skylines.” We make “waistlines” (again, in our sleep). We make “skylines,” thus, yes, but again, most of us don’t make them. We make cities at the intersections of rivers. We make lists of money, often more elegantly than lines of poetry. We make saliva when we talk, somehow anticipating food. We make food out of talk. We make three spellings out of words that sound the same, “through,” “threw” and “thru” for instance. We make insecure people out of wisely impassive people. We make “writers” out of people with no ability to do anything else. We make “havoc” out of places of pristine, sublime and evocative stasis. We make perverts out of huggable, avuncular people. We make “crimes” out of situations that are unremarkable. We make colas out of chemicals (and commercials). We make women out of men, and men out of misprisions of women. We make grammars that are “correct” to deem other grammars “incorrect.” We make mores, and if you don’t stick by them, in order to save you some humiliation, we make “originality,” and in special instances, we adopt the category” sui generis,” in order to put you in there and leave it all fashionably, disarmingly inscrutable. We make magazines that arrive with the frequency of waves. We make quiet out of unread magazines. We make “stories’ out of half-heard “tales.” We make laws out of fear. We make number sequences, like the fibonacci, out of -- oh, I don’t know. We make animals out of water, some of which look like us. We make platelets in our marrows. We make synapses in our wombs. We make fetal (or fecal) jokes out of this prehistoric memory. We make “territories” out of triangulations marked by spots of urine. We make remarks of unintended kindness out of undernourished witticisms. We make art out of bankruptcy. We make gurus out of the unhealthy propagators of “charisma.” We make politics out of unsorted data. We make weather reports that are never true. We make sheets of paper. We make numbers. We make cold people out of dead people. We make cold people out of our own never visited relatives. We make prophecies, when really we should be making observations. We make anticipations of biological finality when we fail to make use of flesh, air, and time. We make music that could soothe the soul, but often softens the wallet. We make music that humiliates us before our neighbors. We make texts that are easy to memorize, and texts that are difficult to recommend to parents. We make poems that sound like other poems. We make stanzas, we make glue, we make treachery out of trust, we make codas out of what were once highly anticipated, fresh beginnings.