Saturday, October 07, 2006

Lost words

Lost words are faces without names,
knowledge dissolving like bitter tea on the tip of the tongue,
the silence between the words when
words will not come.

There is a void where there should be
Synapses firing like Russian roulette, a magician conjuring
nothing. The hat, when
the rabbit does not come out, the silence that is not silent,
the soundless enlightenment of broken illusions,
of old dreams lost and nothing, yet, replacing them;
this is where lost words come from.

The inability to correlate our data.
Not getting dates. This is where they go,
what they become, moments between meaning, growing like static
to envelop noise.

Lost faces without proper expressions,
rubber smiles and the pause before we get the joke, to laugh.
This is what lost words leave us with.
Not silence, but the inability to cope with silence.
Not solitude, but having nothing to connect
to other people with, only what fails us.

We use so little of our language that we
are always failing it. There are more words lost
than made, more wonders not worth the name
and too much still to be found.

2 comments:

  1. "Words Lost"

    Everyone asks the same question(s).
    Same pharses used, over and over, to
    consult one another, to greet one another
    to make amends with someone.

    What happens when we get to where we
    were headed? to that far off place
    in our society that lays forever under
    a pile a rubble marking the end of a saga
    never known--

    endings are voided under the scrutiny
    of the new police order,
    there's nothing left to discover
    unless we feel it necessary to discover
    what we already know.

    Speeches are not death incarnate,
    but instead they are the things dreams
    make up. Imagine a world
    where the
    speech was
    lost. Forbidden. Unsought.

    Grow what you can, grow what you learn,
    grow the bush under the skull
    until a rabbit leaps into
    your stomach.

    (Do not worry,
    the butterflies are shortly behind.)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Words of the end

    Without speech, nothing: no lies,
    and thus no truths; nothing to unsay
    or to say -- only the silence

    Under rubble would be
    is
    are
    screaming voices we never hear

    There are places where words
    cannot fit; they are tools,
    not masters -- they suggest,
    but do not encompass.
    Only a fool believes they understand.

    From the rubble, wisdom: creation
    is born of destruction, the knowledge,
    too, that all we have we have our questions

    The only answers that matter
    are those we find, here, inside ourselves.
    No one else's answers are true.

    And every answer fails the question
    at some remove, unable to slip into it,
    or even around it, just lost in it:
    there is no answer; even butterflies
    are netted in the end.

    ReplyDelete