I wake up with strange words, or sometimes phrases, on my tongue.
Usually, they are in languages that I don't know.
I research how I think these strange things should be spelled.
It is a disarming exercise.
Mea culpa,
joie de vivre,
pied-a-terre.
Sometimes they are in my language, but I still have to look them up anyways because I am not certain that they mean what I think they should.
Conscription,
insouciance,
cryptogenic.
Sometimes I know the words exactly, and know what they mean, but when I look them up anyways, I am surprised that what I knew was wrong, or at least, not fully correct.
Glamour,
travel.
Sometimes I become angry at this, angry at myself for not knowing simple things that I should.
How could I have not known that there were so many definitions for
heart
and how silly was I to think I knew what the word meant without knowing the other parts of it.
Sometimes I wonder if there is more meaning to all of it, these early literatures, or if it is just a simple matter of waking up with words in my mouth, like pieces of a dream that I kept hidden under my tongue like a pill or a communion cracker, just a piece of a dream sentence that got stuck when I was rolling over to face the alarm again, waiting for when I am ready to cough it out into consciousness.
Maybe it is as simple as that.
...
(k)
"and how silly was I to think I knew what the word meant without knowing the other parts of it."
ReplyDeleteis a terrific line. and i think it would make a better ending than what you've got there. i like everything about that last segment (though "sometimes i wonder" seems redundant) but if the poem ended before it i think it would be more satisfying.