A -It's only words
By alice.richards
- 377 reads
It's only words
From the safety of my keyboard I can be god, or whoever is designated
the patron saint -de jour - of luckless writers.
With the simple, efficient click of the mechanical mouse I slice
through the smug clich?s - the 'hopes and dreams' of others. With a
carefully crafted word I punch harder than a Tyson, aim truer than a
Klashnikov, and terminate with extreme prejudice.
One carefully crafted word is all it takes to squash a little person.
Crafted, now there's another clich? - 'writing is a craft' - how many
have, so smugly, said this? Yet they remain ignorant, not knowing how
words can destroy, punish, terrorise, hurt, and even kill in the right
hands, in my hand. Only then is this craft truly crafty.
You cannot get a way with this in the outside world, unless you want to
be locked up, and my particular flavour of self-destruction has never
risked this social ostracism. Oh, I have teetered on the edge but would
never jump. Does that make me coward? Its just so much easier, and dare
I say satisfactory, to push someone than jump yourself, don't you
think?
Easier than confronting the swirling, hurting blackness stopped up
inside - I would risk insanity before I knew the truth. No one, not
even me, can touch this darkness. So elegant, so eminently preferable
to send my sharpened darts dressed up in the finery of words or wrapped
in the purest gossamer. Only then, the beautiful barbarity found in
damning with faint praise. My gift to the unwitting, the reader who
innocently unwraps the needle, for, as all competent deities know, the
devil is in the detail. If it hurts, if it haunts even one long night,
so what, maybe, just maybe my target be pricked with some of my
pain.
Comeback is rare, criticism helps build my defences, makes my terror
bearable, turning the loneliness in my crowded mind to camaraderie. I
skewer my enemies, laughing as I thrust stainless pins, like a
Victorian butterfly collector, through their mewling sensitivities; and
my defence, if a god ever needs one, is simple - "it's only
words."
On the white electronic page I can spew and scatter my letters, in sans
serif, arial and tahoma and form, in an instant, the most brutal of
words, conjuring sentences so powerful, was there ever a blacker art?
Liberation for the small risk of RSI - the poison pen updated. Here, at
the safety of my keyboard I can say what I want in the name of honesty,
be seen as a little bit dangerous, even edgy. And always respected.
Sanitised. What more could a god want.
I learnt a lesson a long time ago; always the weakest in the
playground, always waiting, cringing in expectant terror, waiting for
the bully to turn, it was there I learned power came from the attack.
If you attack often enough, and without mercy, the crowd will be your
friend. They even say I am gifted that I have empathy. Empathy but not
sympathy.
If they knew how true that it is? Next time your arid mind grows wild
in the long hours, trying to trap in mumbles the sorcery of words, look
up the meaning in the great book. There, in the only good book that
counts, the only friend that matters, you might finally understand the
power of words.
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