AVANT SOUL

Eating Her Words

She served her words in a giant copper tureen and drizzled them with a light lemon marinade. All along, her admirers and entourage continually hung upon her every sentence, 'til she half believed herself the words falling from her lips. Damn I'm good.

Drink to me only with thine eyes, and here! These words are a dessert without comparison, fat-free, yet undeniably filling. Lucky bastards you.

But her words remained disconnected to promises of her being.

They contained hidden recycled recipes; a bit of folderol and flotsam, spun with a slotted spoon to skim off the sea foam and the barely audible lullabies of anorexic mermaids. They were shiny and glittery. And when one looked with centered focus, with unwavering intent, one could see that her words were starving and malnourished.

Little bubbles of spit and innocence appeared at the corners of her lips, the slightly innocent untruths which she tried to pass off as the deepest spiritual homilies of each day.

I am profound - - listen to me.

Yet it was NutraSweet pretending to be honey, and there was a bitter aftertaste of saccharine and overreach. Still, her spin doctors were well-paid and her public was reasonably happy.

And in truth and in consequence, they were mainly empty words, and she would pour them out, each and every day, without entering into the center of each sound and taking hold to her being. Hey, they were only words.

It's a job. A little untruth, spouted very sincerely, with half a pastrami sandwich.

To go.

Hold the mustard.

You would imagine from her voice that her wisdom was as layered as a bakery filled with giant wheelable metal shelves, stainless steel and tungsten trays stacked with marzipan, drizzled with the baklava of lifetimes.

Massive ovens lurked in the shadows, out of which came sugar strudel.

There would be muffins and cakes and oatmeal cookies loaded with chips, scones studded with slivered almonds and blueberries, and hot demitasse cups of espresso served with dollops of sweet whipped cream.

You might imagine that so many layers & levels of nuance, fine shadings of awareness, could only arise from someone who'd probably lived infinite lives.

We adored her. She was beautiful, even if her words were the words of an idealistic liar. We should have guessed, when it was whispered she was the past-treasurer of International Procrastinators Anonymous.

We wanted to embrace her, to ravage her, as much as we wanted to affirm that our own postponement was our longest, truly passionate affair, when in truth it was a feral prostitute posing as a priest. We should have exorcised our passionate delay decades ago, but it continues to whisper the sweetest words and lacy excuses into our ears. I love you! You can begin tomorrow!

Oh, all right. I'll believe your lie one more time, just this once.

It was evident to even the most morally-correct of the fools that her current life contains previous consummate summaries of each of the half-baked concoction of lies and identities she'd lived before.

That is just so obvious. You hear unmistakable wisdom, you simply know it.

How refreshing that God-like wisdom finally appears to us pragmatically integrated. What a wonderful woman, to enthrall us with treats and such melodious intent.

And look how thin she is! Even if her ass is too big.

You could half-expect that some butler or fine chamber maid in immaculately pressed attire would serve her words & promises on fine porcelain trays and chafing dishes, carefully appearing on your right side, so as not to jostle the goblets of meaning just poured into heady red wines of your chalice.

More wine and otherworldly promises?

To think -- to imagine -- that her words could fall into your eyes & ears like intoxicating liquid, like nectar, as if their very sound-stream had ruby color and an electrified divine essence, neatly entering into several of your sacred doors where, effortlessly, your Being automatically transforms her honeyed sound into the nerve synapses of personal bliss.

Bless this woman. She must speak to our local Masons. Hell yes, those old guys will eat her up.

But it wasn't to be.

She served her words with tarragon chicken. She tried wrapping them in seaweed and parchment, baking them in a Tandoori oven with curry and humus. She briefly explored a deep and guilt-free period of free range bacon speckled with olives from a small, green-friendly farm in the hills of Tuscany.

She even juiced the hypocrisy of her words and delivered them in power drinks boosted with bee pollen and whey proteins.

When her actions failed to match her words, she ate them, and then, blowing out luminescent bubbles, she spun rainbows from enameled ruby lips like some smoky chanteuse singer in a black-and-white film. She simmered her syllables in a cast iron pressure cooker until they were tender, succulent, and nearly irresistible.

She presented her best paragraphs with chips and salsa.

To no avail.

The pity of it was, she almost believed it herself. Pity that she gobbled her words and never digested them. It was not unlike some especially rich & sincerely revelatory spiritual initiation for groundhog day, and spring was never to come, for it remained merely words.

Words, words, and more words. We will sashay them down the fashion runway . . .

We will splatter them on the airwaves like the war corpses of a morally correct FCC.

It was a diet of unending pontification & disassembled promises, and she was bloated by the hypocrisy of never-quite realized intent. Oh well. It's a living.

We've won this election by God this is a mandate it's authentic values.

The day came at last that she designed and completed her custom kitchen, enhanced with marble counter tops and an island smack in the middle, around which her assistants dressed and marinated the elaborate feasts of her words yet to come. Steady, now! She really means it.

Flowers were flown in from South America, and tulips forced to bloom in darkness made their appearance as centerpieces upon her polished teak tables.

Pamphlets of her former campaigns were bound as ornate art books upon the coffee tables, lavishly illustrated, with each recipe for the variations of words notated and numbered for every kind of budget and household.

She appeared in a sleek, stunning, diaphanous gown spun with the filigree and best intentions of consciousness, like a truly genuine but fickle politician who was the pinnacle of charming deceit.

I mean well. Don't I sound great?

In this night of infinite possibilities, it became terribly plausible and Very Reasonable.
For the next 24 hours, as she had each day for preceding years and actual decades, she'd eat her words in a lovely hardwood salad bowl, nestled with watercress and broccoli sprouts, parmesan cheese croutons and extra virgin walnut oil, drizzled with 30-year balsamic vinegar and just-picked cranberries flown from the last wild lands of Maine. This was the life of the privileged. This was the life of an affluent, God-fearing American woman.

Her guests would Oooooh and Ah, and as each of us shared in her words, there was a bright promise of hope and of intimate spiritual transformation.

Her words sparkled around her like fireflies on a night by the delta, her plans leisurely ancient riverboats moving down free-flowing rivers which existed no more.

For a moment, we were traveling down the Mississippi. Then, as reality slapped us in the tense clenched jaw of morning, we were back on the expressways, following an endless line of impatient, irritable SUV's.

Morning would come, and once again, it would be only words, and we'd leave as empty, incomplete, and hungry as we were before.