Words
Words,
Morning word.
Morning bird.
Twitter word.
I want to use words to tell you about words.
The shapes and sounds
Living in our breath and sometimes heard.
I want to hold up a few, like jewels in the light
To see their sound and hear their shape.
Words are unique
Everyone like a snowflake never copied
Which I try to remember when they spill out of my mouth in a storm.
Words that sound their meaning
Bash and crash, crunch, pitter-patter,
Slap – the sound as hard as the palm that dealt it.
The others that slither as sinuous as snakes off my tongue,
Their poison slicing the sibilance.
And the words that slide as sweet as milk through smiling teeth.
I like those words, the good ones that only turn bad because of the partners they play with.
But some words are wolves in sheep’s clothing, their shape saying one thing, their meaning another.
I try to see them, but rarely do, because but that’s just the point,
The reason they exist,
To hurt without taking the blame.
My words, the ones I paint in the air, and keep for later, are beautiful gifts
lifted from Aladdin’s cave.
When other words are swarming like bees round my head, I hear mine and don’t care what’s being said.
Words like infinite
In-fin-ite
In
Night
Fine
The stream of time without beginning or end, where my place and pain is just a pinprick in the flow.
Seen like that nothing matters quite so much,
Flow, flo-o-w
A roundness in the sound that reminds me of the line in a woman’s back
Or the curve of my daughter’s chin.
Some words I want to hold in the palm of my hand like a bird
It’s heart beating – t-tack t-tack t-tack – because it hasn’t yet learnt how to fly.
I’ll take it and put it into a sentence I’m proud of, and keep it safe from edits.
But then there are the words that stagnate in my mouth,
Hanging on my tongue like dying rats
Their stinking breath belching on my palate,
Filling my saliva with their piss.
You think I’m joking?
You think it’s because I don’t like what they say?
Then listen to me now, and please don’t laugh, because stuttering is not play.
V-v-v-v-v-v- acc-uous.
There, the V word, with its sucking syllables that sit on my shoulder and slobber.
And there’s another, sly because the sound is not the letter it should be
The F in Ppppphilanthropy but that one’s getting better now, him and me
Because I’ve found a cure.
Another word. My first love. The first word I fell in love with.
Passion, did you hear that? Passion
Passion the force in the P that I can say
That says everything I am for the things I think I should be and want, know, love and hate.
Passionately in love with the power of language,
The body that holds the words that can be spoken and written and thought and felt.
That I hear in my head, and sometimes allow out, even when I shouldn’t.
That connect me to you, in ways I often can’t predict, but connect anyway.
All of us woven together by words.
