j. alan nelson

we are only words

Laura Warren disagrees with Kipling.

Words are more than drugs, she says. Great pain and history are released with a word. It’s a game. Say butter. You see butter. You taste butter. A word makes you taste without tongue. A word makes you see without eyes, touch without skin, hear without ears, smell without nose. You infer high semantic meaning from acoustic, phonetic sounds or symbols. Say the word destiny and you see a dark horizon, surrounded by guilt and the anxious nothings you float in like a lost turtle. You cross a border by night into a country for which you do not have a visa, and no right to enter. Words make you turn into that cat scrunching into a tiny box. Words add extra fingers to your hands, words turn your legs into wheels. Words turn time into sand, tilts your skull to empty sand out your eye sockets. Write the word woman. You see a woman across the table. You hear her talk, see how her dress lifts, separates her breasts. She’s a queen. She presses her signet ring in hot wax and then onto your palm to seal this moment apart from the others that fall into sand.

No, I say. Words are mere morphemes. Like signal flags.

Head on a platter, Laura says. Biblical MacGuffin. Saul wants one hundred Philistine
foreskins. Arc of the covenant.

Stop, I say.

Laura smiles her sad smile.

No, she says. Plunge deep into the physics of words. You cannot find a way to break the seal words that hold you. You shout, you threaten this historical existence constructed of words but these are words flung on words. Raindrops on the ocean.

Words are a mere pretext, I say.

Try a mere catch phrase, Laura says. Its falls harmless with a silent impact in the sand by the waters of words that spangle like stars. No matter what you do, These words imprison you, coerce you by the authority of phrase and diction. You try to break away from this semiotic cell but find you’re not a real boy or girl but a puppet. Words make your teeth. The words make tobacco in a tobacco tin, then emblazon Prince Albert on that tobacco tin. The words make you chew tobacco and swallow. Your stomach spasms. You retch, powerless.

Laura, I say. You saw me run, win the Brazos River race. No. I saw you at the news room in that long dead newspaper.

I pause, look about. I stand in a newsroom. I see Laura. I gasp. She sees the inadvertent reveal of my raw beating heart, all four chambers. I fumble as I try to yank my heart under cover with a cloddish jerk. Blood spatters on the desk, newspapers, clothes, the floor. I grow cold. Vision fades.

Laura gently lifts my slowing heart, slips it back into my chest, reconnects the atria and the ventricles with tender fingers. She lifts, carries me outside to her as a freak blizzard hits.

My vision clears. The thaw hits. Ice melts off the windshield. My skin warms. The diffused light shows Laura is immortal, her long delicate arms and legs aslant. Her dark eyes peer at the indescribable described, where everything else, myself included, fade into her background. The wind whips so hard the car creaks and shifts. A wild day so fucked up, no one misses us despite the commitments shattered. When I say goodbye she shakes her head.

Everything is just a move in a word game she says. That’s all.

Now I find the words scam me though I know better. The words prod to buy shit on eBay, make me sweat in furs, shiver in ice. I look at words on a ballot and choose. I write with a special pen that writes upside down and under water. I make more words to latch onto words already spoken. The words add weight with each letter. I feel the weight of a planet cluster, crush. I don’t exist except within these sentences that can be deleted or erased on a whim. Cultural exchange is simple fiction. My friends keeps a polite distance, become mere acquaintances. I find they die from old obituaries I spot at random.

Still, Laura. That word presses me, grinds like molars break pecan shells. Words are my tiny epitaph that sound in the abandoned cemetery after I collapse into dust. I don’t connect with anyone anymore. Words deem me mortal. The afterlife is mislaid. My only purpose comes from this text with nothing external or emended. The unexpected tide flows in. I’m swamped. I long for no meaning, but even that implies meaning. Fe fi fo fum. Everything is just a move in a word game Laura Warren says. No time passed because time is made from a word. Words do not fail us, we fail words. We do not shape words. Words shape us. We have no meaning without words. We are words. Only words.

Yet my body ticks away forty years. I trace the thick scar ridge on my chest. I long for a word free of definition. Anomaly beyond description. The scar on my chest burns with fiery resonance of a voice in a word. I cannot break from Laura’s words. The words break, snap my joints, break my life into fragments, into gibbers of nonsense. The wind whips hard, scours me away as words remain. The time will come and take my love away but the words say Now. Here you are.

Without love. Crushed and ground. Buttered. Now.

__________

About the author

J. Alan Nelson, a writer and actor, has work published or forthcoming in journals including New York Quarterly, takahē, Litro, B O D Y, Stand, Acumen, Pampelmousse, Main Street Rag, Texas Observer, Arc, California Quarterly, Connecticut River Review, Adirondack Review, Red Cedar Review, Wisconsin Review, South Carolina Review, Kairos, Ligeia, Strange Horizons, Illuminations, Review Americana, Whale Road Review, and North Dakota Quarterly. He has received nominations for Best of Net poetry and Best Microfiction. He also played the lead in the viral video “Does This Cake Make Me Look Gay?” and  the verbose “Silent Al” in the Emmy-winning SXSWestworld, and recently narrated viral New York Times videos on PEPFAR.