‘Where Do the Words Go,’ a Poem by a Friend

Here’s another poem by Clelia Albano, author of “I Can’t Breathe.” (I’m putting her words in italics to distinguish them from mine.)

Where do the words go when they are detached from things, when a slip
of the tongue subverts the sprout of a thought.
Have they a separate existence
from ours?
Do they take a walk through the promenades of parallel worlds?

– I don’t want to get too deep –

My eyes sting, imagination is in standby.
Neither a good food nor relaxing music can help me.
Where are the words I repent I uttered, the words I eagerly whispered.
Where are the words of my dead,
the words of my mother, the words
I screamed, I spelled out loud as
a child, the ones I learned coupled with drawings of leaves, nuts,
strawberries, bottles, ships, cats
and dogs, frogs, trees, tables and chairs, mom and dad, roses and stars,
houses and cars…
Do I exist without words?

And now, for my analysis.

This is a poem about the regret we feel when we say things we shouldn’t have. In my analysis of a new poem by Jason Morton, I wrote of how words can help us break free and can heal us. But sometimes, of course, words hurt. No matter how hard we try, we cannot choose words too carefully.

Words fly out of our mouths like projectiles, hurting those whose ears hear them. Or, to use a more classically allusive simile, words are like all those evils that all-too-curious Pandora released from the jar (pithos). Once they’re gone, we can never retrieve our words. They’re lost to us.

“Where do the words go”? Clelia asks, “they are detached from things” that would keep them safe from hurting others, the pithos of our would-be closed mouths. It’s too late “when a slip of the tongue subverts the sprout of a thought,” the sprout being the unconscious, which Lacan said is structured like a language.

Do words have “a separate existence/from ours?” Are they in “parallel worlds?”…that is to say, are they so far removed from our world that they’ll be eternally inaccessible to us? She would so much like to retrieve all the words she wishes she never said.

Going “too deep” might involve discovering parts of her unconscious that frighten her. Her eyes “sting” from the regret she feels over seeing the pain in the eyes of others because of her words. Her “imagination is in standby” because she doesn’t want to imagine the pain she has caused those she cares about, with the words that flew out of her mouth too quickly.

No food or music can soothe the guilt she feels from the pain she unintentionally caused others, from those words “eagerly whispered.” There aren’t only her words, though, but also “the words of [her] dead” (long-lost family and friends) and from her mother, words that hurt her, too, and which may have provoked her own regretted words, “the words [she] screamed.”

Now, these lost words aren’t only harsh ones. Sometimes they’re of pleasant things, coupled with things like “leaves,/nuts, strawberries, bottles, ships, cats/and dogs, frogs, trees, tables and chairs, mom and dad, roses and stars,/houses and cars.” As a poet, she loves words, and when they fly out, she can feel that she’s lost them forever, too. Perhaps if she got them back, she imagines that she’d have the opportunity to revise them and make them even better.

As writers, do we “exist without words?”

As a blogger, I find it inconceivable that we can exist without them.