Ramblings of a word lover

back after a bit of a hiatus...wedding in the family..and other maddening chaotic situations...but that prolly deserves a blog of its own (or should that be 'post'?) anyhow, the laziness just doesn't seem to end, and here's one of my favourite pieces...feel like it presents the permanent state of my head incredibly accurately...oh and happy new year to the ones who want it to be happy...

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You can say anything you want, yessir, but it's the words that sing, they soar and descend...I love them, I cling to them, I run them down, I bite into them, I melt them down...I love words so much...the unexpected ones...the ones I wait for greedily or stalk until, suddenly they drop...vowels I love...they glitter like colored stones, they leap like silver fish, they are foam, thread, metal, dew...I run after certain words...they are so beautiful that I want to fit them all into my poem...I catch them in mid-flight, as they buzz past, I trap them, clean them, peel them, I set myself in front of the dish, they have a crystalline texture tome, vibrant, ivory, vegetable, oily, like fruit, like algae, like agates,like olives...and then, I stir them, I shake them, I drink them, I gulp them down, I mash them, I garnish them, I let them go...I leave them in my poem, like stalactites, like slivers of polished wood, like coals, pickings from ashipwreck, gifts from the waves...Everything exists in the word...An idea goes through a complete change because one word shifted its place, or because another settled down like a spoiled little thing inside a phrasethat was not expecting her, but obeys her...They have shadow, transparence, weight, feathers, hair, and everything they gathered from so much rolling down the river, from so much wandering from country to country, from being roots so long...They are very ancient ...and very new...they live in the bier, hidden away, and in the budding flower...what a great language I have, it's a fine language we inherited from the fierce conquistadors...they strode over the giant cordilleras, over the rugged Americas, hunting for potatoes, sausages, beans, black tobacco, gold, corn, fried eggs, with avoracious appetite not found in the world since then...They swallowed up everything, religions, pyramids, tribes, idolatries, just like the ones they brought along in their huge sacks...wherever they went, they razed the land...but words fell like pebbles out of the boots of the barbarians, outof their beards, their helmets, their horse shoes, luminous words that were left glittering here...our language. We came up losers...we came up winners...they carried off the gold and left us the gold...they carried everything off and left us everything...they left us the words.
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Pablo Neruda