Words

Like flowers pressed between the pages of my books,
preserved only in name, reliant on the imagination
of observers to come, to extrapolate their size and colour,
to re-create in their minds what their texture and fullness
might have been before I extracted the very life out of them,
in order to preserve a quality that never actually defined them –

(What I preserve isn’t the flower,
or the experience of the flower,
but only the idea – no, an idea –
of what the flower might have been
when preservation was desired for it -)

The flowers are transformed, no longer what they once were.
They are now their own thing, whatever that thing is –

And like those flowers in my books, preserved only in name,
so are the words in the same books, preserved only in name.

The reader cannot know what these words once were
in my mind, in my experience, the textures, their fullness –
they can only imagine, extrapolate, re-create in their minds
because what once was, before the words emerged, is mine alone.

Words are simply a memorial,
and preservation is a misnomer.

My words are tombstones that mark the graves
of experiences that were once full and textured,
but having had that life extracted from them,
they now perform a quality that never actually defined them.