First Word: Larissa Higgins: Wept

Cornflakes

How do you drum up enthusiasm for a word as desolate as wept?  It’s so dense, so drenching, so absolute – no delicate trickle of tears, but a solid, sodden autumnal sadness; a wall of water, with hopes and expectations flattened to a matted mass of leaf-mold in the street – gone beyond repair as long as weeping lasts.

            And after, in the sun, tears are dried and the gutters are choked with leftover misery – all knotted and compacted into the remains of the world’s least appealing breakfast cereal –  swept up with the winter leaves and carted off under the cover of the night to factories with no window and prohibitive red “x”s on the doors.

            All together now, say “yucch.”

            The chlorophyll pads, the leaf spines and the dessicated grief ground up with leftover sheets of fiberboard from the factory floor, masticated into a splintery pulp by machines with cogwheels instead of brains and processing board where their pleasure centers ought to be –

            Ejected on jets of hydraulic fluid – the machines spit it out and ship it out in marked boxes in unmarked trucked and push it in street-corner groceries to dupes like, well, like you and me –

            I could weep!