24. The Flesh of the Fish of the Word

Where word, in every state
of, when word is, and
the way in which, the degree
to which, it is so
as if in the place of an image
or an image as instead it, sense,
the distinction made
between the meaning as made
and the meaning as meant. To
photograph a wave so you know it is a wave and
water and not a hand
waving, silent and the air
moving around it, current
and eddy, the metaphor of water
and wet for it, as it is that
a word is a metaphor for
itself and the source and target
that it might mean, the concept of must
being impossible in a world of
code and concept.

I’ll regret it
always forgetting Hungary, believing
the world continuous in the fact of myself,
my being aware of anything only so far as
I am aware and
myself. I would have been there now
if I hadn’t been there in the future. It is just
so that the word is torn through
and through, made anew,
so that to regret is
to do something (something not
particularly specifically known) again.
Eat the words alive
until their blood dribbles from
your mouth and over
your lips
and down, so that you can
feel the words on the tongue, taste
their blood, feel their warmth
and smell. Each word
is a small thing we kill to make
a sentence.

The fish float in formation
in front of an aquamarine world.
Their reef marks the boundary between
the ocean and the sea. You see they
are made out of many colors and made up of
many words, and they swim before
the words that define them,
and they swim our words away.

A little time to save
some time to say it, but I cannot for I
cannot even know it, what it is to say
or how I’d ever save a word
from itself or the way we use it. Brutal are the ways
of the speakers of words, brutal to the words,
brutal to those listening. From that treatment, a word
has been drained of emotion and exists as a small leaf
floating on a wave towards the beach and
floating back out into the ocean and
floating back to the beach. The sequence
is simple: There is a wave then there is a wave
then there is a wave. And so on. There then is a wave,
and everything is different, and there is a way,
and the leaf is gone.

Every word is the same as every
other word, except with regard to meaning and
matter. Even as they disappear, they are the same,
in that they leave behind the stain of meaning,
seminal discharge rich with life,
for a time. A word is used up as
a word is used. You can put it away
now.

What you might do to
a word is save it so you remember
it, or you might store it in a book,
or file it in a computer, and in that way
you might believe that it still
exists. What you might do to
a word is highlight it, call attention to it
as you say it, turn a yellow light
upon it, so that you can see the word
is there, and in this way you come
to experience the word as
a transformational experience. What
you might do to a word is not use
one, to say nothing, to write nothing
down, to allow no worded thought
out of you in any form, no grunt or sigh
even, and in these ways you might
come to understand that the word
has no power over the human. What you
might do to a work is cancel it,
rub it out with an eraser, scratch it out
with a pen, cut it out with
scissors from a book, and in those ways
you might perceive that there are
no words except that we believe
there are.

A word ends
with a breath cut off
with a period
with a pause.
A word ends
with a finished thought
with a closing book
with the deaf of the blind.
A word ends
with a hope for continue
with a role in parades
with a mouth run out.

Every book you read
or mean to read is
the same book. Or every book
is a chapter in one great book
we read throughout our lives, ending
our reading sometime before
the book is done. The true book
is the book read.