Words,
yes words.
Words,
lingering in the heavy air
as smells that fade slowly,
as scents of places and times
pungent and sweet,
or subtle and disturbing,
erotic and filled with deceit.
Words said with joy,
laughter,
anger,
hatred,
regret, or
as putrid, rotten
smells of death,
or heavy things
that lay on top and suffocate.
Words that connect
with invisible delight or
as chains to constrain
and hold the spirit captive
in the power of spite,
or as bullets in the fight.
Words that lift,
and words that fall,
and words in synchrony,
or words with no place at all
but to sit at borders
and crevices and corners,
or wait in the dark,
wait for us all.
Words,
yes words,
that build all our human places
and lifts our minds to infinity,
to creativity beyond creativity,
to ideas and insights,
to the sacred and the holy,
or to the trivial and mundane spaces
of being human and ordinary,
crass and vile and incendiary.
Words as objects material
and the stuff of dreams and thought
beyond this world it seems but
always in it and clinging to us all,
sticking to our patterns,
clustered in our ways
and our sectioned days
that drift from moments
of ecstasy and to times of despair.
Words shift the world and create
all things old and all things new,
all that is believed and
all that is doubted,
all pages read with delight and prospect,
all sentences in the firm hands of fear.
All is words,
words is all,
in the construction of the
the me and the you and the us;
and under the power of words
some rise and many fall,
but the words shall remain.
Words,
yes words.
10/11/2017