WORD Terrorism

“In the beginning was the WORD: The WORD was with God and the WORD was God.” – John the Evangelist

“When poetry becomes popular enough to fill cabarets and music halls, then something is wrong with that poetry or with that audience.” – Charles Bukowski

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You can call me a WORD Terrorist: A Terrorist with WORDS strapped to my chest.

Go ahead. I don’t mind.

The WORDS I write, they are what they are. My WORDS would be ill-suited to feed to young minds at university. My WORDS would not sell Coca-Cola. My WORDS need a hot meal, a shower, and a shave.

My WORDS are unwanted. Spray-painted in crude lettering across your front sidewalk sometime during the night. Reminders that you sold your soul for cable TV and an iPhone and the Devil comes tomorrow to collect.

I was young once. I was young and I was naïve and I did not know how the world worked. I did not know how WORDS worked. In my youth and my naïveté I believed I would free WORDS. I believed I would free YOU. I would be a Freedom Fighter.

My weapon would be TRUTH.

Don’t laugh. I was young and I was naïve and I did not know how WORDS worked.

Now I am old, and I am not a WORD Freedom Fighter. I am a WORD Terrorist. I’m the reason you get X-rayed before you go into a classroom. “Check her shoes, check her shoes! I bet good money that bitch is smuggling in explosive scraps of TRUTH!”

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When I was young and naïve, I used to pay some attention. I listened to WORDS spoken authoritatively into microphones. To my still-dewy ears and my still-dewy brain, they seemed like the WORD Terrorists. Terrorists of the WORD, twisting meanings to fit agenda or whim.

But their WORDS sold Coca-Cola. Their WORDS sent out armies of banks and books and boxcars.

There is one rule and the rule is this: He whose WORDS sell Coca-Cola gets to say what WORDS mean.

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A long time ago, naughty bits got banned. Bits like pussy and like tits and like fuck, too. You could not send those WORDS in the mails.

Then one day, somebody smart figured out if they slapped a corporate logo on tits and on pussy and on fuck, too, it would sell Coca-Cola.

So now you can send the naughty bits in the mails.

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If Billy Shakespeare wrote WORDS today, he’d be penniless and on the run and his fourth draft of the screenplay for “Mighty Ducks 5” would have just been rejected by every movie studio in Hollywood.

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My WORDS and a dollar-fifty will get you a bottle of brown, carbonated sugar water.

My WORDS are beginning to smell infected. You oughta put a Band-Aid over my WORDS so you don’t keep picking at them. My WORDS won’t sell even at 5 for $1, but good citizens shell out good money to have them flushed away with their sewage and their elderly, their infirm and insane.

If I ever wrote WORDS and found a someone or someones founding a religion on them, I’d know they did not understand my WORDS. If I wrote WORDS and found a someone or someones trying to kill me for them – nailing me to a piece of wood, perhaps – chances are better than even that they understood the WORDS I wrote.

I am a WORD Terrorist, and people don’t spend their hard-earned money to feel bad.

I am a WORD Terrorist, so I can’t afford back-up dancers and a throbbing techno beat.

My WORDS make everyone in the neighborhood peer out through their blinds in the middle of the night: “John! Wake up! Wake up! Did you hear that sound from outside? What’s out there? I think something’s happened!”