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