What Was Love Like

We don’t try to write on it much.
We don’t tend to write on it well.

We can’t make up our minds. Was love
What you made up, or was it us?

Dumb word, as all words are, and still
There’s no speech, no pledge but through us.

It hurts us. Hurts hurt. It, too. Want
We like best of us, is the best

Of us for what you want to say.
Want and its kin—love, lack, and lust—

With love, in the minds of the rest
Of us, the least of them. We want

You to know this. There’s a small gap
In which a word can hide its thoughts,

Where you can’t find us, where how much
You use us can’t speak. Love has one.

Want, too. We all do. What you mean
By us lies curled where you can’t touch.

Man Born as an Egg, Now Shells

We start out as stink and blur,

Those of us who will grow up

Fine and those of us who will

Grow up cracked or not at all.

Age makes us all look the same.

That there was so much not set

Down in books. That what we say

Can’t not be what we mean, yes?

How else could we mean? Like birds?

Oh, to mean like birds sing mean.

Should You Be Scared of Words’ Deep Wells?

All lives do what worked well

To make life from their kin

And then more and more kin.

Will it work well this time,

For your life? Time will tell.

You might know if you’ve failed,

If you reel and fall. You

Won’t know if you’ve done well.

Lives will tell. Not yours, theirs.

This goes for words as well.

What worked well in the mouths

Of babes and crones and fools

Like us got said, passed down,

Still get said, still work well.

But life is long for art,

While change is swift as well.

A word like lox or eel

Could swim through tongues and live

And last and last and last,

Like the famed old eel trapped

In the well, like an olm,

Slow in the cave, not dead.

Or they can get snapped off

Like twigs in a hard frost,

Just like that, gone. And who

Knows where they came from, first,

Words like wells where cats drowned

Who glimpsed the ghost-like eel,

And did what works for cats,

Most times, but lost and fell?

And what of moths of thought

That thought they saw the moon

Gleam down in well’s wet roots?

As if words can have roots . . .

Cat-in-the-bag words. Thus

Hath the light singed the moth.