An Un Anyone? Poem by Lonnie Hicks

Careful
there are Nouns here
which innocently
can
contain your life.

Were it not for 'Un'
all would be lost.

So many of our utterances
not only restrain the brain
but prevent
emphatically
new things being said.

Language is a universe
in which you cannot be understood
unless you already agree
with its assumptions and premises

of right, wrong or the good;

A universe in which you cannot conceive
anything really new
because you do not have the language
to express the idea;
a language which does not yet exist.

So the problem is
how to say something new
when you lack a vocabulary
or utterances?

I don't have a final solution
but I do have a start:
dismantle the current language first
starting with the Noun.

To see the new
we must first Unsee the old-
here my friends lies salvation-
in the utterance Un.

Un-love
Un-done
Un-believe
are an excellent start
because they get us to begin
the unraveling
of that which is wound so tight
that new meaning can't get in.

To continue:
Un isn' t simply the opposite-
it is a pronouncement
a nullification-
a cleaning out-
of that which occupies that noun space
so something new can get in.

Now let's take Un-love.

To Un-love is not to hate
for here
we simply state
we are not in the state of love.

Not so strange,
it happens to all of us.

We simply
one day
fall into Un-love
meaning love has gone away.

Doing this has caused so much misery
yet we have no word or meaning
for what Un-love means.

You see the problem
or should I say the unclarity
that Un-love brings.

If I
one day
suddenly
Un-love you
what does this mean?

Not I suppose

just that love
has gone
but where has it gone to?

In Un-love Land
there is no hate
not even perhaps
indifference
but, perhaps
to an empty space
prompting a need to find new
words, nouns or even vocabularies.

Now you see the problem;
the conundrum here-
no such words currently yet exist-
unless we pause now
to invent new words
to fill that void
and in doing so
create a whole new language
or description of what is meant
by Un-love.

Here my point exactly.
we don't know
what Un-Love means
or its vocabulary
until
some poet
creates the vision
and the new words to
that go with it.

Pointedly:
how do
I now
un-write this poem?
See what I mean?
Can't be done
unless I create
somehow
a vision
and words
to capture it.
Humm,
Consider this the Un-Write.
Maybe it will catch on.