So much for self, then. The little blue man
is whatever she would have him be,
a silent mime posed in such predicaments,
bizarre and dreamlike, as her whim dictates –
though to put him through his paces is to lend
this valiant clad-in-azure ready-made Tom Thumb
a seeming particle of seeming-self, and her fond acts
of challenge and protection, this drama in which
what’s lost is always found, enact a self for her.
Muteness is of the essence:
he will never answer back, never protest.
His head is not an echo-chamber
thronged with the ecstatic buzz-
buzz  of conversations that have never happened,
foiled gambits, the droll embarrassments of meaning.
Yet he is not even his own avatar,
for thousands like him are scattered about the world:
adrift in pockets and bags;
dropped by chance at the ancient roots of a tree;
lost in the cool galleries of the museum;
abandoned in a wilderness of glass;
trapped forever beneath ice,
some on their backs, some upright,
some bent double, faces thrust toward their feet;
or consigned to an incinerator far out beyond the city
where toxic smoke can be allowed to rise
at a proper distance from the living.
There is none now he has the power to save.