The Private Lives of Words

The Private Lives Of Words


I don’t want to sound
“public.”
I don’t want, even, to pretend
to some importance.
So why set the words
down—preserving them.
For others?
Clarifying them
for myself?
Already, you see patterns
start to form.
The words, once
written down, call
to other words.
It’s so lonely
on the long, blank page,
so isolated living in your head,
behind eyes that are
forever looking
at the surfaces of things
from their secure
outpost, wondering
how it would be
inside—
inside a locust tree, for instance,
or a hummingbird.
Even inside that old rocking chair
sitting in the living room
since Mary, the ex-neighbor, sold it
at a yard sale.
And it’s stayed
against that wall, overshadowed
by the piano, hardly noticed
beside the shelves of multi-colored novels
that probably
commune
with each other nights—
Hemingway continuing his belligerence
with Fitzgerald. De Maupassant
chatting with Flaubert.
You get some words together, and you
never hear the end of it.


Joseph Somoza

Posted over on Bobby Byrd's site White Panties and Dead Friends