Paved into leather-bounded books are “definitive” lives of a word—
ignoring his, your, and my first breath,
every color that reflects through unshared lenses,
constrained riffs of wails from behind the garbage,
unrestrained chortles around hearty food hugged by gleaming porcelain,
nearly audible buzzing emanating from canvases full of
indiscernible
    curved lines and numbers.
If the well-known sagacious, bespectacled Sir throws gray words at me
I’ll slap them away, and rip them apart
                             le tter
                 by
                                                     let te r,
and have him, you, and myself
spit wads
of painstakingly painted words at the shreds.
So the scraps
of the definitive will
coalesce into a hued river that feeds into the vast ocean of bashing, serene human memories.
The Makers will scorn my clawing at their carefully, calculated work.
unable to piece back the long gone scraps, we’ll hear the fading cries;

they were solid bars of diamond, surely able to withstand the pressure of time and opposition—

Winning against the set-in-stone gray, we’ll release bottled up rock hammers;
into the ocean, the wind will carry our elated cries of freedom.