Wings

Words lie scattered everywhere
Across the mesa’s table.
You only have to go there

To pick them up in armfuls.
But what can you do with them?
You know they can be harmful

In the wrong pattern. You know
Arranging them’s dangerous.
The combinations you throw

Can’t be simply whimsical.
They sign something or they don’t,
Meaningless or mystical,

Or, sometimes, weirdly vicious.
They’re not a jigsaw puzzle.
They’re only tralatitious,

Meaning what you mean in them,
And yet, they turn in the hand
To mean what you’d have condemned.

Often the wind stirs them up,
And they whirl their pointed thoughts,
Which aren’t yours, wheeling in flocks.