Word Flourishes

Intricate, complex, in literary unusual word arrangements—not so much the fussy flourishes of George Washington peaches and blues, the kind of carpet one can’t step onto in shoes. But instead a maze, a weaving of centuries, book upon book, a lifetime of experiences reincarnated, crafted and told.

Not merely the hyperbole of Radar O’Reilly, formerly of M.A.S.H., who spent too much to enroll in the improved-writing-course through post, driving the colonel crazy listening to his daily report’s peppered with literally, literary-vocab mine fields. An episode that stuck all these years due to my daily adding of words to my own tomb-tome of self-ish-scripture.

I’d paid good money too, to send in my script and have it analyzed by a professional living in Los Angeles were all the best psychics & psychiatrists wind up, a man I imagined surrounded by cats and giant split-leafed plants blowing lightly in the breeze, him sitting in his second story, mission-style apartment pouring over the tell-all inked markings with a magnifying glass.

His neat-scrawled letter arrived in my country mailbox, a rusty-rickety attached with orange bailing twine to a cedar-post which acted too as the corner-post to lock cows in alfalfa fields.

I wonder how does a graphologist keep what is originally his in knowledge of patterns? Not try to change the height of his capital T’s or the coil over of his lower-cased, cursive o’s? And if one were to change these, would this be enough to lift a personality from deep ditches, to a more ordered life, one in which my own handwriting, if matched to my more square and precise, as if a ruler had been used, hello-kitty loving, straight A Japanese friends’, then I might too, fully enjoy living.

Drum roll please, and I was not impressed with the results. Wish I knew in which stack of papers or journals that letter might be, or if I in one of my culling of old, burned it a long winter night ago while sullenly gulping peppermint tea? From memory, the gist of that long awaited letter sent off to discover the mysteries of my psyche came back saying I was highly emotional with a severe right leaning in slant, paired with an upward optimism exhibited by my hill climb with dark words. Imaginative with nowhere to go—locked down and flighty, ornate as twisting vines, roses paired with gargoyle heads topping a glossy, black garden gate.

I found I didn’t want to know, what I already knew, but wanted instead for a credentialed person to discover some hidden way out, a simple trail, not so high-flown.

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