the treachery of words in poetry

this is not a pipe, this is not a picture of a pipe
this is a sentence I’m forming that happens to contain the word “pipe”

this is not a pipe, this is not a painting of a pipe
this is not Rene Magritte’s painting of a pipe
with the words beneath it reading “ceci n’est pas une pipe”
which in English translates to “this is not a pipe”
these words are not a pipe either but the treachery is different

this is not a pipe, this is the word “pipe”
when I say it out of context it could mean one of ten million things
the word “pipe” could mean to an English speaker in the twenty-first century
close your eyes and imagine “pipe”
it could be a glass cannabis bowl
it could be the green thing Mario crawls through
it could be your grandfather’s polished Walnut
distant childhood memory you only remember as a smell but this is not that pipe
this is not any of those pipes, this is just the English word “pipe”

this is not a pipe, this is linguistic shorthand for a pipe
this is a vague approximation of a pipe
words can never hit the target of meaning
we can only hit around the periphery of meaning
in the hopes all our arrows average out
communicate it close enough

language is an abstraction with concrete aspirations
language is an incomplete but yearning presentation
language is a hologram, every little chunk we get makes the image sharper
but we can never quite touch it with precision
language is the carnival game with the beebee gun
you could never blow out the target from the middle
just hope to carve a circle around the red to maybe win the bear

this is not a pipe nor is smoking pipe
nor brown smoking pipe nor brown tobacco smoking pipe and yet
we get a little closer to communicating clearly
with each beebee of words we shoot around that pipe
in hopes that we might win the bear of meaning

this is not a pipe, this is the word “pipe”
but these are the tools we have at hand
with work we can help each other understand
I think that’s pretty good

Last updated November 12, 2015