Listing to Port

1. Eat words. Devour them book by book. Chew them over, casually and quietly, as if it was the most normal thing in the world. Take words on picnics beneath waterfalls. Raid the library at midnight for juicy poetry.
2. Be a fan of words. Follow them about. Ask others where to find the best words and go to the places they recommend and hang about there trying to look interesting. Have sweet reveries about words before you fall asleep at night.
3. Get to know words. Go out for a coffee and bring your words with you and look up five hours later to see that your coffee has gone cold. Stay out with words until it is slightly too late. Have silly little adventures with words that make you giggle, but which you cannot quite explain to other people. Write letters to words and wait breathlessly for their reply.
4. Have a relationship with words. Dream all day of the moment when you get to touch them. Look words in the i and tell them what you are going to do to them, and then do it.
5. Have a bad relationship with words. Lie awake at 5 a.m. wondering where you went wrong with words. Take long walks alone to avoid the messes that you and words have made together. Let words hold you and explain why they no longer love you, but only cry when they have gone.
6. Murder words. Cut them. Cut them again and again until you can no longer quite see what they were before. Wall up words in dead-end paragraphs and leave them there to decay unread.
7. Rewrite history. Raise words from the dead, raw and new and clean, and shape them back into something that can be set free into the world. Keep their history a secret. Let them only know that you love them. Watch them go away from you and hope that they come back.
8. Grow old with words. Let them get well-worn and familiar. Let them be polished smooth like seeds while time roughs you up. Hold words in your hand and live together until you die, then let them close your eyes. Let them mourn. But leave them plenty of good soil, so that they can grow when you are gone.