i make my home in the shell of building that i didn’t make. And in that hermit shell, i make my words. i whistle them, like the toothless man telling me his stories. But i whistle them here, in the tarnished-golden spiral of this mathematical home, with nobody to listen to them. My words fall. Lead-like.

Somedays i fear my words, how they sound. i can’t figure out if anyone knows what i mean when i say “I feel like purple tonight”. Words chill me as i feel them and their meaning wandering off. So i shorten my sentences, limit my palate, bifurcate my tongue. i want to capture their meaning, like glassbugs in lightning jars. Let their clarity crack open the light.

But words are like childhood, they escape you so lightly. And you look for them in the mundane places. But their meaning is so untranslatable, that describing your childhood to another when looking is useless. So i went searching to make another childhood, making moonbeams into liquids. Making “I“‘s into eyes. And making myself smaller. And i found it, the sound of word-solids melting into literature-lava in the corners of the earth. i loved the sound, solidifying yet still liquid definition. May it remain forever so. May words be little escaping wooden hummingbirds, flitting about on pages and tongues between.