Language & Linguistics

What Was It?

I was eating my dinner alone,
sitting on the living-room couch
watching a movie on TV for company
when the forces your covetous presence prevents
slowly crawled out in fibrous droves.

Without you to follow me with your
clipboard, or record the game my face plays,
masquerading as a cryptic territory
and your field of study, the energy maggots
turned the furniture into an ectoplasmic
mass with the weight of iron: soft but
resistant, a taut balloon against the hand.

Valiant En Abyme

Our grand peregrinations through these temporary cities,
These pale window box poppies of the laughing class,
Drifting as if time came in the same long dollops as starlight,
Resemble an epic journey as a coffee bean resembles a llama’ s foot,
Though the kitchen table may be far from the desert
It’ s near in spirit, a yellow oasis before the wind
Starts its restless sweeping of white flower-dust across the lintel,
Marking the fine edge of things like children asleep
At the opera, piled up near the door, summer passing

Cant

Thar he blows! Plus, tusks
crushed into grins, grins
host to, guest of, impish

Nature, her fort/da “jewels”
glassified behind blank
opposable pupils — Ahabit perfected

(“perhaps memory”) by/for the dicey
Veil. Auto-didact/-dialectics
staged in rent-to-rent

“crowded houses,” asea to har-har-
poon Terrible Tom’ s tom-tom
stutter — VAC C. Gone

but for “language, music,
imitation and perhaps memory.”
Owns no umbrella to forget to splay

Written By H'Self

The signature public
the only avant-garde
behind invention

wheelchairs (in) "the street."
Type (A) bleeds through the page —
or screen — it becomes —

a pool as it we're
one drop rules(.)
Individual talent

divides tradition
into tithes, tenths
and nationalized tribes —

catch-as-catch-can
market share erosion.
Staggered Lees

piggyback the Gap.
John Henry — busted by Keaton.
Gentlemen, 'e thinks,

as the bespoken,
it was the other
kind of happy

A Language

I had heard the story before
about the two prisoners, alone
in the same cell, and one
gives the other lessons in a language.
Day after day, the pupil studies hard —
what else does he have to do? — and year
after year they practice,
waiting for the hour of release.
They tackle the nouns, the cases, and genders,
the rules for imperatives and conjugations,
but near the end of his sentence, the teacher
suddenly dies and only the pupil
goes back through the gate and into the open

“Any fool can get into an ocean...”

Any fool can get into an ocean
But it takes a Goddess
To get out of one.
What’ s true of oceans is true, of course,
Of labyrinths and poems. When you start swimming
Through riptide of rhythms and the metaphor’ s seaweed
You need to be a good swimmer or a born Goddess
To get back out of them
Look at the sea otters bobbing wildly
Out in the middle of the poem
They look so eager and peaceful playing out there where the

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