WORDS, WORDS, WORDS

WORDS, WORDS, WORDS

Words are merely symbols

and not the things they stand for.

They work best in concrete,

capturing the mundane:

               meat and potatoes,

               bacon and eggs,

bridging vistas:

          sunlit trees aglow in autumnal shades

          eastern rim at dawn tinctured in palest iodine,

less well when aiming at abstractions

like love and goodness,

least well or worst

when attempting to connect to ideas

that are both abstract and infinite

such as God,

the weightiest word of all,

the biggest block in communication’s playpen,

a toy perhaps too dangerous to dangle. 

One by one we unplug the placebos

that have sustained us through the morass

until at last we come home

to the being

we were born with,

the edenic garden of authenticity.

      November 7, 2008