Meaningless

These words are meaningless and vacant, cast upon the paper like loose change dropped onto the pavement, scattered everywhere and followed by a scramble to get them back into some semblance of order.  These words are transitory, ephemeral, caught on paper like larks in a net, resigned to being trapped until someone sets them free from the fibres that bind them and constrain them.  These words have been written on a scrap of paper torn out of a notebook, using a blue pen, an old blue biro bitten to the quick, with its casing shorter than the refill and blue ink drying and coagulating at its tip.  These words have been scribbled quickly, scratched out, re-worked, scored and annotated at a table in a café three stories up above a large shopping mall.  They have been written while nursing a pot of tea, eking out every last drop of liquid and thought, a single tea pot and a single cup on a single table out of the way.

These words are untidy, badly written and illegible in parts but they have been transcribed onto the screen of an old and well worn laptop with a cracked casing and a battery that falls out when moved, reformatted to look like something else, something better planned.  They have been saved in binary to be rehashed and regurgitated at will.  They have been written from the heart and not from the head, they have been infused with hot tea and a dash of milk.  They are filled with feeling but are without logic, they are heavy with suggestion but are without substance, they are phantoms of thoughts and apparitions of phrases.  They are wandering vagrant words without meaning or intended purpose.

These words conform to a linguistic structure, they can be recognised as words, letters in a sequence and in small blocks that can be pronounced.  They look like a language that you and I would feel at home with.  These words are arranged into sentences and paragraphs but don’t let that fool you, structure does not give them value or presence, looking like something is not the same as being.

These words are meaningless but they do have value, the value in having been written, having been created.  They have a value in the pleasure of formation, the feel of the words on the paper, the taste of the words on the lips, the act of writing them down and the pleasure of tapping them into the machine.  These meaningless words are there for the writer, removed from the mind and distilled into print, tweaked and tugged, shaped and honed into something with form but still without meaning.