[7] Noun & Verb

The noun is our friend. Take fork. Take pencil. Take duck. Dock. Pelican. Cake. Cat. Carpet. House. Wagon. Road. Adjectives are that gushing, well-meaning, but untrustworthy peer who says we were the best, most lyrical, most literate, mellifluous poet at the open mic last night, the absolute kindest person in the world, and the nicest friend ever...until we just don’t know what to believe anymore. We know what we want to believe, sure. We also know we want another slice of cake, too, another tall glass of cold milk. But are we really hungry? Do adjectives and adverbs do anything else but make us want more? Add on a qualifying layer? Do they enhance, or make us wonder that whatever we thought was simply true, might just be otherwise? Sugary icing on sweet cake. Scaffolding on a building already painted. Check-on baggage when carry-on will do. The noun is our unadorned friend. The one we call in a pinch. The one who will tell us if our haircut sucks, if our complaining sounds like whining, if our brilliant stoner’s-mind poem needs rewriting on a sober morning three days from now. Nouns show us the way. Verbs take us there, where the writing arrives at the end of the page, the pen having done its work, with dicey adjectives and just-in-case-you-didn’t-get-it adverbs but mere tincture drops sparingly used. Unburdened by the gooey, by the gummy, by the show-off clatter of look-at-me similes, we return to the top of the page and read what before we only thought, but didn’t know; what we felt but hadn’t expressed; what we now clearly see and feel and trust and know. That’s what friends are for. Verbs are the bees, nouns the flowers. A group of verbs is called a vibration, a group of nouns—a matter. Even a vibration needs to rest. Bees do sleep, by the way, and honey can stay true forever.