The Rip Post                                                                                              


Words Fail Me
Words fail me.
I know a lot of them
but they fail me
They don't come articulate and ready
They hide behind synapses and coagulated emotion
They are not dependable
As they are for real writers who swim and die with words
I have to dig them up, settle for their second cousins
and amalgams and hyphenates and similes
to create the suggestion of what I mean
But it's the only music I am lucky to know
the meter of the dullard sentence
bleak, deaf, unsinging
So I sometimes sit alone in a room, door shut
twiddling piano keys, twiddling twiddling
building sentences others hear as jibberish
or off-key diddling
But I hear what the brush might have painted
and the notes of the sentences I write that make no sound
no melody, no flat or sharp
               ---Charles Bogle

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