Episode 14: Wanting Words
Hi everyone, I hope you’re doing as well as you can be this week. Our poem and episode today explore longing for words when we don’t have any. One of our deepest aches, especially while navigating the depth of pain or peak of joy, is to have words at our disposal to give shape and meaning to these experiences—for ourselves, our notebooks, our poems, and our explanations to someone who hasn’t experienced what we’re trying to communicate, but is offering support. As we can be lonely in a crowd, we can feel lonely among language that doesn’t fit, doesn’t exist, or has been stripped from or imposed upon us. It’s often more disheartening to not be able to generate words when we can’t find the right ones in others’ poems, songs, books, therapy, etc. (the places we most often search). Of course, we do frequently find words in these places and it’s worth considering that some of what we feel may never have adequate words. Even so, part of mental health in relationship with words is considering not just our mind (and the ways in which clinical jargon can isolate if it’s weaponized), but our body, and the intricate language that it offers us—one which we may be out of practice in communicating with.
I’ll share it with you now:
Dearest body,
It’s cataclysmic to want
something immaterial that we
don’t have,
can’t find,
and feel unable to generate: words.
Words for joy and suffering
alike—for life.
Does something carry this want until we quench it?
An object, person, or place?
A car, a lover, or a forest?
Will being in the car, lover, or forest, either
enable or give words, flowing from language’s
invisible faucet?
I suspect the answer is no.
At least not always.
And I suspect it’s because the faucet
circulates cold water currents. The hot water tank
is off—rusty, husky, crusty. Hasn’t been used
in a very, very long time.
The language I need is nearly extinct.
Because you, body-brain, gave me my firsts—
like language long before words—
is it you who offers sounds, words, and sentences,
and then clicks them together like looping linked lights
swooping across lamposts like jungle vines?
Maybe it isn’t my mind, up there, alone, distinct, special?
Maybe it’s you because you hear the birds first,
mating and making and manufacturing throughout
late winter? And when their intimate song soothes
and smoothes into soft, silent spring secrets—
language to guide us—it’s their offering of offspring:
a map to fly on our own, if we’ve listened.
I know that if a language dies, much is left
unsaid, unheard, un-hearkened—knowledge,
continuance of natural landscape,
climate, cycles, ecosystem, and culture.
I never thought to think of you this way.
And now that I do, I know we will pay the price
of another wanting: to be above you, to subdue
you, to be in control of you. To crave and obtain
medicated, silent obedience we call peace.
I won’t do it.
The shame is thick in thinking that it was
only in the desperate wake of a faulty mind
that I exhorted you to help me claw for words
when in candor, I came to you because I finally
realized where home is, and that home always
has keys, words, doors, language.
Breathe the words in. What do they make you feel or think? How did they connect with your senses? What colours or symbols did you notice? What meaning did you draw? Metaphors? Interpretations? Clarity? Messages?
