A Cup of Words

From mouth to ear across a lifetime lived, traveling strings tying lives together thread on thread. Every one word building lifetimes; bonded mud of bricks to house our broken bags of trailing flesh. We will hold each others heart, we will hold each others head up high. Better or worse for the word or two that has made, will forever make, and always is, the difference. Speak this word or that, watch the matter of it all unfold, past lives shaped and shaping now in crucibles of all our conversations. Words to bridge and touch this world, like knives or axes falling, slicing moments each peeled back, revealing bullets spent and sailing on to wounded tearful souls. Comfort words, words of love, different shapes and sizes wrapped in different voices heard. Inflections, accents, whispered, loudly shaped intense of spirit, colored by emotion to enforce. Chosen words of purpose: dispatched, planned, let fly in haste, erecting endless layers to our waste. Tools of our intention common to our time, reserved and planned, chosen with meticulous care, whose definitions matter more than when or where. Piercing silent dreams, floating on the breath of every God, making mysteries of all we seem to be. Mirrors made of silence once, we soon are made of words that move us through a doorway, joining into life. Today, a workshop for the poet. Write about a cup. Standing empty, purpose unfulfilled. Imagination startled as I smash the cup inside my head. A million shards of broken pottery lying on the floor. Broken poems and promises lying on the floor. Shards thrown out of context as are we. Broken souls from out a shattered God. Each shard, a refugee. You and me. Metaphors attached to all the brokenness we own. Cups of purpose seeking our fulfillment. Joined to make a whole of all we hold; become a cup our truth will then unfold. What began as empty, filled with our life’s portion, sharing, sipping, spilling all along the way. Losing contents we may label dear until the final tipping of a cup left upside down. What words escape our pens that are not truth. Whose content change the soul from which we bleed Whether subject cup or love, or other siphoned dalliance, at our finish will complete a lifetime’s cupping need.