They ask me about words
and
I forget that they often
don’t know the same words
that I do.

I forget that sometimes my words
and
their words are mysterious
and
often not as profane
as they might be used to.

Then, I remember
that there are countless words,
concepts,
ideas,
and
beliefs that I am totally,
sometimes shamefully,
unaware of.
(all of these based in vernaculars unfamiliar)

None of us live the same type of life.

None of us
have earned passage
through hardship
any more or less
than anyone else.

Ours are circumstances,
unshared.

Not luck, not fate, not grace,
not inherent anyway.

No different than my last name being Claywell
and
my typing that very same name
into the system of The Department of Corrections;
seeing that name,
the same as mine,
unowned by me,
belonging to faces of men
and
women that I have never
and
likely would not ever meet
in our respective lives.

What does it matter?
It’s a name,
no different
or more or less special than Jones or Smith.

The name is mine and theirs,
as unique to us as we are to one another;
poet
or
prisoner.

Person first, second, and third.

Like a story,
a book,
a treatment plan,
sitting on a shelf or locked inside
a mind until the proper moment
providence or provisional,
authored by the judiciary or just
some guy.
(like me)

We live by words,
are released by words,
are transformed by words,
frightening, fitful, fretful or foreign.

Words give us our humanity,
allow us to encourage or enrage,
engaged so as to establish
a renewal,
reestablished ability to
manifest,
to actualize
the abracadabra
of
our own magic act…

our lives.


*
-JBClaywell
©P&ZPublications 2021