The Word Collector

At first he would hoard words for later use,
words he could slip out in his empty room,
pianissimo, onomatopoeia, o-be-lisk: hard words
slapping the silence, sharp words razoring, oily unctuous words.
Sometimes a word sprang out unushered, ghastly…
The sibilant, the husk, the gravel on the tongue
peopled his room with invited guests. Then,
like a kerb-crawler at a roadside smash-up, he secretly
stole from teenagers rapping on the street, grabbing
at their vernacular, their graffiti of the inner ear, their seduction
of the beat; and coasting playgrounds or flâneur
of the pavement, he caught words out of babes' mouths, treasuring
like gifts their semaphore of consonant and vowel.
He loved the stickiness of words, how they clung
to the speakers' lips like burrs, long after any sensible
meaning was gone. Soon he started to steal words
from bookshops, memorising a babel he could smuggle out
without paying; from library tomes he made up lists: Fescue,
Yarrow, Rock Sea-spurrey, Ribwort Plantain, Smooth Sow-thistle.
His hunger grew, insatiable, quaffing Ordnance Survey maps
at one sitting, noting the fields and fells, bridges and crosses
that signified his land, smiling at Beer Hackett and Gussage,
Snave and Ryme Intrinseca like some secret joke. Finally,
crucified by cacophony, world wide, mobile, radio, feeling
the blood throb in his veins like ink, demotic, demotic, and
words paining his ears, riding the air like colours,
glosseme, gnash, parturient, pigswill, he wound up bloated,
mash, coagulate, labyrinth, calumny, surfeited, sick.
You may spot him now on your travels, rooted solitary
at a country crossroad studying the signs; he is the one who makes
a meal of every word on the menu in that diner,
who looks for the writing on the wall; he it is who writes
to the local paper nauseous at misspellings, the paucity of diction.
He is a sorry case. His only hope is therapy, or surgery,
nil by mouth, or poetry.

© Jacqueline Mézec

(This poem was selected as a winner of the 2004 Jersey Arts Trust Channel Islands Poetry Competition (in association with Writers Inc) and was published in States of Matter - Writers Inc Writers of the Year Competition Anthology 2004.)

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