With Words

I get up every day with words!

I wash my face each morning and go down

to the street with words.

With words—inaudible—I scream

so as to tear to bits the laughter that surrounds us.

Ah! we all are stuffed with words.

We own whole archives, know them all by heart,

in four tongues or in five.

We take them at night in little pills

so our exhaustion can fall asleep.

Words wrap themselves around our tongue.

The purest ones transmute themselves, purple,

blue with silence. What good are they

asphyxiated by saliva, prisoners?

of words, we own the loveliest;

those that unyoke love, freedom …

I swallow them as I ask myself if one day

I will sail with them; if my lung

that holds them in them will ever swell.

There flows through us a river of words:

I go to bed with them, I get up with them,

and words cannot express …