At the base of the throat is a little machine Which makes us able to say anything. Below it are carpets Red, blue, and green-colored. I say the flesh is not grass. It is an empty house In which there is nothing But a little machine And big, dark carpets.
Spicer begins with a strange, almost mechanical image: at the base of the throat sits "a little machine" that lets us say anything. Speech, here, isn't magical or personal. It's a device, and a small one. Below it, the body opens into an imagined room of colored carpets, as if the inside of a person were furnished like a house.
Then comes the pushback: "I say the flesh is not grass." The old idea that human life is fleeting and green, only to wither, gets rejected. In its place the speaker offers something bleaker. The body is "an empty house" holding only the voice-machine and some "big, dark carpets." The colors from earlier have darkened.
The mood is cool, deadpan, and slightly unnerving. Nothing is said outright about grief or fear, yet the emptiness lingers. The poem suggests that all our words may come from a mechanism, with no one at home to speak them.