Fill

Geof Huth, “flyspeek” (17 April 2017)

The word is our fill, if our hunger is for language. We can drink a stream of words cool as water to soothe and temper us. In the desert, every source of water is holy and essential.

Yet even those thirsting will reach their fill. At some point, the stomach can hold no more water, the body won’t allow further hydration. Satedness comes sometimes in the form of revulsion to what one most wants and needs.

In a world with a surfeit of data, so much of it reduced to lettered words, the mere thought of the alphabet can repel the literary person, who searches frantically for an image sans word, a corner void of text, a languageless tableau.

Sometimes, the only antidote to the disease of language is the smallest linguistic fragment one can find. Just a word. Language out of context. The streamless seme.

The pwoermd performs not so much as language than as its opposite. The isolation of language. The reductio ad absurdum of poetry. The last refuge of the word-studded poet.

A poem of a syllable. Or a few. No need to take even a single breath during the performance of it. So small you might forget you ever heard it. Or saw it. Or understood it.

Yet the pwoermd somehow cures you of language, and your parched tongue becomes—once again—wet enough to speak, so you must say and do say,

"Stop."

pw(o’er)md