Language

Written: 2012-2013 x Edited: 2024

You spoke with all the casualness of corporate discretion,
soft tongue weaving muted threads of syllabic indifference
until we were encased in the haphazard haze of literacy,
choking on our own self-aggrandizement.

There were no colors in your eye that day,
only the grays of conversation-
backing each moment into a corner
like the moral majority of the nineteen-eighties;
your mother fought and died in Tipper's war
but her locution lives on in your touch-tone veins,
soaked through with the blue of O2 depreciation
you only find in municipal discourse.

Matter of opinion is a pseudo-science for the impressionable
and they honor their arrangements;
you remain sprawled on a steel table-
the dead pine you planted in your grandmother's back yard,
skin drying as each sententious word slips between split teeth
to fall on the ears of the deaf by choice;
"I’m thirsty," you say.

But they only smile,
and they cheer,
and they only cry.