a poet's dictionary
definitions & antonyms
Words have fallen ill. As usual, the medicine is in the wound.
I write definitions by getting intimate with the origin story of the wound/word, its antidote, its particular illness, what it wants, and/or what it needs. I attend to the soul of a word that’s been deadened. A soul survives all abuse.
It’s not a mental exercise but instead, journeying into the unknown dark and walking the word back home.
The problem with me is I am still a child. I still want people to mean what they say. I still want people to be as interested in their truth as I am.
I want the luxury of being naïve which is really just the opportunity to stop having to see two people in every person—the one who speaks and the one who is honest. It’s exhausting. As I said previously, adulthood is the distance between someone’s mouth and their voice. This dictionary closes the gap.
A Poet’s Dictionary is for the little girl in me who was even more of a child than my peers and somehow also older than my elders. It’s for this ancient child in me and in you. What the fuck else are we to do but reenchant this world? I don’t accept the modern developmental stage of numbness nor the uneasy feeling that no one cares about what they say anymore nevermind what it really means to mean each word. I don’t accept the dissociation that is the lost boys. Let’s go home y’all, please. I miss it.
In some cases I find one word that heals a word in a quick way. These are the antonyms. Everything is part of a polarity. For example, the antidote and antonym for rage is laughter. It’s the extreme embodied response that matches the all-consuming feeling of rage. They’re both potent and take over physical sensibilities. But this also tells us a story—infusing life with laughter and its less obvious manifestations reduces the need for its extreme polarity to make an appearance.
Below are this month’s definitions and antonyms. I hope these words find a home with you and you, with them.
Desire (n.) An answered prayer.
Self-love (v.) Finding what you need to feed yourself so you stop eating the parts of people they would otherwise use to love you.