What are words?

Words are what we use to get what’s inside to the outside, to construct, destroy, confuse, explain, articulate, cogitate, coagulate,comprehend, and confound. Each one, spoken or written, is nothing more than a musical note, a sentence a musical fragment, an essay or a lecture, a song, a story, an epic. Words are heard and committed to a memory or a feeling or a sense that may or may not be recoverable. Recorded and committed to paper or screen, they offer reverb of interpretation and meaning. Words create war. Words lead to peace. Words sooth. Words sow doubt. We inhale and exhale them like breath itself. The soul’s molecule’s at times, the ego’s triumphs and catastrophes, pride’s splat on the pavement, the sum total of our words are vapor, steam, ether, wisps here and there, parchment in files and folders, term papers and diaries, purses and pants pockets, journals and junk mail. Words cannot convey love, hate, anger, and hurt but in the absence of other sensation, they are considerable facsimiles for what we wish to express, or can’t, or don’t, or won’t. Hunt with your words, Haunt with your words. More words serve some; less serve others. Words turn you inside out. What was buried is exposed. Barnacles on your surface seek cover. Words are pricked out of you with acupuncture needles with knitting hooks on their ends. Words are raw shards of you dangling, drying in the open air like the thinnest wafers of meat. Others smell them. taste them. Others ingest them, and regurgitate them back to you, to others, unrecognizable. Words ooze like oxygen from the loquacious. Words constipate the reticent.

What are words? The swinging bridge from the inside to the outside that scares and thrills and kills. The sounds you hear from the canyon and the breezes when only the flimsiest of support keeps you from the abyss. What you are until your inside is your outside.