Words, odes, epilogues, forewords, afterwords, back-words…words!

Words pouring down from the sky like incessant, thundering, cataclysmic, merciless rain. Angry words, happy words, loving words, benign words, malignant ones too; a rain of words that carry sunshine in every plump drop.

Just. Too. Many. Damn. Words.

I feel as if I have been pushed over the edge, thrown from an unsure precipice into the open arms of a 50-foot fall. There I go landing unceremoniously into a fathomless ocean, into foam, thick undulating waves and debris of just too many words. Thud! Splash! Drown!

Buzz buzz buzz… the endless buzzing of thought-waves, ceaseless written banter, trite articulation, mind-numbing expressions, age-old maxims, quotations, poems, ideas, books, papers, words stitched together to produce mediocre raiment that barely covers the open sky of imagination…and yet…yet we persist with our pens, these swords, our bruised armor and rusty daggers marching along and onto the battlefields of unidentifiable emotions, thoughts, feelings and behaviors trying to make sense of this experience called—Life!

These words, these very culprits, have warmly welcomed and greeted the death of the writer inside me.

All of them with their lopsided half-smiles, their askant glances, their wry amusement welcomed me into the foyer of my own creative death. They dressed up, even those words with quotation marks hanging at the beginning and the end like Christmas tree lights silently blinking you into attending to their double entendres, what a mockery! These chock full of frothy, foamy words staring back at you from endless coffee mug expressions, even the idle newspaper lying on its side at the breakfast table offers…more words.

I said, “The pen dried up.”

The oceans of ink I once dipped into have been absorbed by the rich earth of the body. I don’t write words anymore, I simply live them.

Consciously I placed them on my tongue, I chewed them, ate them, slowly masticating every tiny detail, squeezing every shadowy nuance out of them as I languidly rolled them around my tongue, I let my teeth settle on them until their ink suffocated and escaped out into the walls of my mouth and splashed rivulets of black and blue down the corners of my mouth.

When I swallowed and they entered my bloodstream…once I became the word…I decided it was time to write.

Again.

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Assistant editor: Jennifer Moore /Editor: Bryonie Wise

Photo: elephant archives