I handcrafted words
without knowing them,
slow words,
slowing me down,
until they spoke back
and told me
they were portals
to the invisible,
where I relived
cast-off lives
with those I talked to,
learned from, yearned for,
bedded, hated, hurt,
and others I barely knew.
A very few words
became the place where
I never was wounded.
Like the vision of Arjuna,
I saw the universe
in thousands of forms,
even the most horrible,
as words of myself:
“Behold, I am become death,
the destroyer of worlds.”
And somehow my words
were tricked into
a bottle and sealed
with a permanent stopper.
Reading them now,
you have let me out.