Word Smything

I chip at words
As a climber chips at cliff faces
Securing ropes through pitons pounded into rock walls
I pound verbs into nouns
In a determined effort to describe
Wonderful life
Life of wonder
Double knotting words
Like ropes
Dangling over chasms
Trying to hold fast.

Drawing battle lines flanked with language
I want your loins to be Hell on Wheels
In literary combat
To know the Rolling Thunder in your gut
Bleeding vowels and consonants.

I want to Spearhead language
In ways that make you weep
To smell sounds
And taste noise
With senses tuned to cosmic
Sensual frequencies
Your soul’s Armored Cav
Giving sight to touch
And spectral image to solid thought.

I sweat, grind, twist and
Wrestle with incomplete sentences
Making more of them
Than they are in their parts.

Sparks fly at the anvil
Hammering sentences
Into paragraphs
Orange-red heat smelting
Poetry from life
And love
From the iron of passion.
Forging petraglyphs onto paper.

And if you sigh
I am victorious.