cesar

Words have always been a part of my life. They are imbricated in the delicate lines making up my existence. Words contain rooms, music, ideas, and mystery. I used to think of words as something inaccessible to me, relying instead on eruption, on an overwhelming sense of having to expunge something. I was in the fourth grade when I learned the power words could have. My father assisted me with the completion of an assignment for my teacher, a poem. We sat together on a green couch in the living room, the sunlight streaming through our bay windows (words contain light), and he instructed me to write the first words that came to mind on a piece of paper. I did so, and once completed we decoded the tangle of jumbled compounds and nouns and verbs and created a poem. My teacher loved it, I remember the red crayon A+++ expressed on the top of that poem. It was simply about the moon, a farm, animals in love with the sky, night into day, that sort of thing, but it awakened in me a frenzy to assemble words into pictures, pleasant and disturbing pictures that translated ephemeral joy (words are images). My quest is to discover the true nature of my language, the truest expression that it contains in its limited space.