There is No Truth to the Rumor

there is no truth to the rumor
the Constitution's
a goddamned piece of paper
 
it's not vegetable, but animal
dressed as parchment--
 
invented in Pergamon
in not yet Turkey
3rd century BCE
when the papyrus ran out
 
Ionian Greeks called sheets of it
diphtherai, or 'skins'
 
by the time of Herodotus
writing on skins was common
 
Assyrians and Babylonians
in what for now is called Iraq
were already writing on skins
 
writing and rewriting
past traces of earlier writing
on recycled skins
they'd scrubbed and scoured
 
they wrote what they believed
mattered
on something meant to last
 
rabbinic books weren't books
but scrolls of parchment, as
were, later, early Islamic texts
 
great civilizations as living cultures
writing themselves on skin
 
writing rewriting
laws, histories, religions, all
on cured skin: split
sheepskin, goatskin, cowhide,
horsehide, squirrel and rabbit
 
aborted calf fetuses
hairless through and through
as is the skin of angels
would be reserved
for especially precious stuff
 
yet regardless of grade, without exception,
skin being mostly collagen,
the water in ink or paint
would melt it slightly
mcreating a raised bed for the writing
 
like welts on a body
showing what's been done to it
 
even today, to write on parchment
or color it
the tiniest bit watery
is to bring all this doing up
 
each writing a rewriting
overwriting the life of skin
 
so if its breath is gone, its muscles
having lost all sense of purpose
bereft of heart and liver, still
in the heat and humidity
of human and meteorological exertion
it buckles, shifts, sweats and squirms 
 
uplifting a little,
like from a death bed,
giving lie to the rumor
mthe Constitution is a piece of paper
damned or not
 
because, even dead, it will let us know
this was a living matter
that was being painted up, written off on
chewed by dogs and lied over