One Word

(Say Something - A Great Big World & Christina Aguilera)



I am looking for answers I am afraid to find 
To questions I am afraid to ask
Searching for an explanation
Searching for one word

Yes...one word

One word to explain everything
One word to bring clarity
Is your name the one word 
Is your mothers name the one word

Is the word
Is any word 
Merely a mask
A veil of letters
 
I am running now after nothing
Into the night that ends
And begins and ends and begins

Yes...into it I run 

Flailing my arms
Lungs burning
Mind racing
One word
 
Where is it
Where are you

Leaving always leaving
People leave like trains or planes
Your heart expands for a lover
Expands and contracts
You bleed for her love
You search for one word to make her stay

One word again
The bloody evasive one word
There is no word to make anyone stay

So she goes

And the wind blows 
Through leafless trees
Creaking in its laughter

The word is in a rain drop
But which one
There are so many rain drops
No way to look into them all

Will you help
Oh...you are gone already

I sit alone 
In the forest
In the city
On a street corner
On a log by a stream

Scenery changes

But not I

I was searching
While your hand slipped out of mine
Before I could kiss you
Before I could make love to you
Maybe in making love 

The word
The one word

Would be uttered
A sacred word 
A tantric word
To free spirits in the night
Trapped in their own freedom

Not free
Never free

For the word is never spoken
Not even between lovers
Masquerading as truth 
Lust lifts lost souls out of the mire
Only to be lost again
And again and again

This is no noble quest
This is a fantasy in search of meaning
In search of a word
In search of an interpreter
A sanguine metaphor
Folly and vanity 
Vanity and folly

We pretend and act and parade 
We play house and then betray ourselves
Leaving our damaged images behind
Collateral damage of our insatiable passions

To wonder why 
To wonder how
To search for the one word

The one word

To make sense of their fractured lives
So where are you
So far from me
So distant
In the past and forgotten
A dream from two nights ago
A dream I forgot
As soon as I woke up
The sun bleaching my memory

No artifact
No fossil
No fragment of our time

The moments stretched into years
Forgotten in a garbage dump of fears
A wasteland of consequence
An aborted rendezvous 
What word could have I sputtered 

What word
What word
What one word
 
If I screamed it
Whispered it
Wrote it
Sang it

No

No word stands against vile actions
Recriminations and resentments stacked and counted before bed
Kindling for fire fights
Napalm induced rage
Scorching our bodies 
I want you to stay my love
My new love
The love I am afraid of
(I am afraid of any love now)
The scars healed over
The scabs no longer picked at
Calloused and cold are my veins
I barely feel myself anymore

I am numb

I am drowning in myself
Suffocating on the very elixirs which are to make me okay
Downing my white oblong friends each morning

So I can sit 

Without pondering Camus's question
Hamlet's soliloquy 
Alphabet soup 
Words and words and words

Ah Macbeth perhaps
All sound and fury 
Ah yes - sound and fury
Signifying what
What indeed
 
Nothing
Nothing 
Nothing

We look and search and quest
With Don Quixote
Battling ferocious monsters
Only to be told 
Windmills are innocuous  
Seeing a mirage 
For nothing doesn't cast a shadow 
Only broken hearts do 
In the noon day sun

One word
One word
One word