[This poem is being posted by popular request. Note that it's a performance piece: If you're reading it quietly to yourself right now, you're doing it wrong.]
Words, Words, Words
Words, words, words.
I want to devote my life to the study of etymology:
find what madness melds Lunesta to lunacy,
trace the connection between sacred and forsaken,
between force and metaphors,
and find what binds “phallus” to “fallacy.”
I want to trace the ley lines of language,
find what verbs got laid by which nouns,
and go further back, until everything was Good.
And the Good lost an O, and became God.
And in the beginning, God was the word.
In Sanksrit they say the first word was Om,
and when that sound shook forth from the darkness,
all the words were born.
In America, grease was the word
was the word that you heard,
it’s got groove, it’s got feeling.
And in Greece? The word was Theos,
God, but spelled Theta Sigma —
ΘΣ
—which is just OM on its side.
The whole universe in one word,
which makes perfect sense when you learn
that uni-verse means “one word.”
I have so many questions.
When Newton sat under that apple tree, did he realize
the gravity of the situation?
Was his revelation a result of his smarts
or how much it smarts being struck by an apple?
Could he have imagined an Apple
would one day make smart phones?
Do smart phones smart? How does that strike you?
Do you call someone who’s obsessed with their smartphone
a … phony?
Did Christ cause catastrophe when he cursed the fig tree,
because someone, somewhere, thought the plural of figs was fags?
And if Christ’s newborn body was was laid down in a manger,
and “manger” means “to eat,” doesn’t that give you pause
when you think of his dying sermon saying,
“Eat of this, for it is my body”?
I want to learn everything.
Teach me how “hasheesh” named the high
and mighty warriors “assassins,”
how the “cado” of “avacado” is close cousins to “cajones,”
how intimate and intimidate
were once the same word.
And once I’ve traced the continents
of all our salivating tongues,
I would say your names, and mine,
until we could hear. Are you listening?
We are all One Word spoken in a different way,
just one ocean crashing in a different wave.
We may pronounce it differently, but you and me?
We share the same name.
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