Words today are like the shells and rope of seaweed which a child brings home glistening from the beach and which in an hour have lost their luster.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
That is how it stiffens, my vision of that seaside childhood. My father died; we moved inland. Whereon those nine first years of my life sealed themselves off like a ship in a bottle - beautiful, inaccessible, obsolete: a fine, white, flying myth.
Words have a life of their own. There is no telling what they will do. Within a matter of days, they can even turn turtle and mean the opposite.
Words are also seeds, and when dropped into the invisible spiritual substance, they grow and bring forth after their kind.
Words are like weapons; they wound sometimes.
Parents, teachers, clergy and physicians change lives with their words. It is hypnotic for a child or patient to hear an authority figure's words. As I am always sharing, 'wordswordswords' can become 'swordswordswords,' and we can kill or cure with either words or swords.
Words played an important part in my growing up. Not only the written word... but words that flew through the air: jokes, riddles, puns.
All our words are but crumbs that fall down from the feast of the mind.
Every time we walk along a beach some ancient urge disturbs us so that we find ourselves shedding shoes and garments or scavenging among seaweed and whitened timbers like the homesick refugees of a long war.
Words are most malignant, the most treacherous possession of mankind. They are saturated with the sorrows of all time.
Like the sand and the oyster, it's a creative irritant. In each poem, I'm trying to reveal a truth, so it can't have a fictional beginning.