Tuesday, July 14, 2015

Words

WORDS

The mystery of words
Spaces between meanings
Meanings between spaces

The syntax of words
The anatomy of words
The pin point precision of a full stop
Cutting the flow of a thought
Arriving at a conclusion

The punctuation of words
Questions, exclamations
The many pauses and stops
That are celebrated by colons
Semi colons
The unending river of commas

The linguistic root of words
Often beneath the soil 
That nurtures it
Plucked out and thrown into a foreign land
An alien language
It withers or morphs
Adjusts or deludes

An identity on words
Laid naked on the skeleton of race
Nation, language, culture
The flesh and bones
Of relatives, memories, siblings, parents
Tribal totems, hanging on words
Strung in sentences
Encased in a language 
Sent miles over seas
On strained desperate 
Phone lines 
Identities in words 
Solidified from the cooled molten heat
Of centuries of experience
Of a tribe, a people, a place
Calmly answering the questions
Who am I?
Where am I from?
What do I believe?
What am I supposed to do?


The classification of words
Odd blocks of meaning
Uncomfortably placed 
Disjointed and schizophrenic
To fit an A to Z
Of a dictionary

The literacy of words
Smelling of ink and dyes
Parchment and crinkled paper
Worn and used
Sometimes unused
And worn 
Unexplained
And written

The taste of words
Honey on a tongue
When the sounds roll over
In a phonetic dance of pleasure

The smell of words
In pauses between pages
In thoughts between pauses

The memory of words
In bookmarks marking time
From a day when a page is left
To a date when it is reopened

The surgical knife of words
When laid on a slab
Someone is told
To state explicitly
What he means

The passing of words
Like subways in the night
On the dark subterranean tunnel tracks
Of the mind
Never stopping or ceasing
Just changing tracks
And running the same routes again

The end of words
The final stillness when they run dry
And when the fertile goddess of knowledge
Waters the soul
With its own language

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