I Am Words

I am words.

You can see me standing here,
and you see bones and skin,
muscle and sinew,
You can vivisect me and see my organs,
Put me under the microscope
and you can see my cellular structures
on down to the very atoms
and subatomic particles that form
this physical body.

But no.
I tell you
I am words.

I am transcendental
I am philosophical
I am sesquipedalian

I am Logos,
word, logic, reason,
I am made up of synonyms
and antonyms
I am a living contradiction,
the word made flesh
encased in what is visible,
tangible, audible, palatable, scentable

Beyond all this
I am words.

I am misted over dawn,
mornings saturated by rain,
I am bold midday
pregnant with thunderstorms
building up in strato-cumulus clouds
ready to rip open with lightning
cut across the zig-zag sky,
I am lazy afternoons
napping through the long hours
waiting for sunset and dusk,
I am the night,
long and rich with sacred darkness.

I am words
of wisdom and foolishness -
the right thing said, perfectly timed
and the faux pas, expertly misplaced.
I am hope,
I am fear,
I am here,
I am words.

I am words of comfort and healing.
I am words of mischief and humor.
I am words of thought and introspection.
I am words of love and longing.

I am ten-dollar words
and five-cent ones, too,
I am four letter words,
unprintable invective and censored cruelty,
I am simplicity and complexity,
I am kindness and vilification,
I am all things and nothing.

I am symbols scratched on paper,
I am utterances of sound,
      wafting through the air,
      fading from time,
I am the silent language of gesture
      and sign sketched softly
      against walls of noise,
I am signification,
I am semantic,
I am connotation and denotation
and I will not be defined
because I am -
I am words.