Joking Apart Poem by Maureen McManus

When you say I can’t touch your furniture
I think you mean I can’t touch you
and I say I wouldn’t.

I sit there looking away from your eyes
wondering, why your pupils never dilate,
why I’m alive.

‘Whereof one cannot speak, one should not speak’
said Wittgenstein, that philosopher,
in his first book.

By the time he got to the next, his last,
he claimed language was a game. I don’t want
to choose between

you and your furniture, but I want to know
if you can be you and not you at the same time.
Ambiguity

a woman tells me is hard to come to terms with,
and I know what she means. When you say
I can’t touch your furniture

I say I won’t come round so,
but I mean
I don’t want to touch your furniture.