Words on Skin

Why is it that
All too often
Those cold
Violations Isolations
Creep upon souls
When bodies
Try to connect
With Words?

Why is it that
The most tender
Of moments
Those times

Charmed and beautiful
Often feel
Wordless?


Out beyond words
Spectrums of touch
More than

Fingertips and skin

Caressing
In sound
Stroking tapping moving striking
In words

Or perhaps
No

Not words -- voices

Voices
Keeping pace
With feet and breath
Working as tireless hands

And voices
Talking/Writing
Words more than words
Equal to music
Before nouns
Beyond verbs
Antecedents of laughter

Speaking not in the ear
But upon the skin

Now these words
May indicate
Absolutely nothing --
Yet the actor reads from
The New York City phonebook
And his audience is in tears

Laughter not contained

Words
Moist with
Tongue teeth and lips
Lungs and larynx

Words
Ceasing meaning
Yet flowing
Between and among
Vibrating as reeds
Bodies as reeds

Twin reeds
As oboe or bassoon

Producing the unrepeatable moment

With tone, timbre and melody
Emerging through the middle of
(Not the body, but)
Bodies
Many bodies


Before meanings
There was the rhythm of tongues

Persistent hammerings of rhyme

Before understandings
There were polyphonies

A proliferation of dictions

Before truth
There were excesses of voice
Harmonies
Nuance
Dissonance

Before any intellect
Before any ideas or mind
And after
Long past all words

In two twilights of thought

There were
Voices

And there will certainly be

Song
Hymn and mantra

A joyful

Chaotic

Inescapable

Collision of

The Lyric