Hard to swallow:
When they see you,
stretched languidly across the page,
frivolous in your expenditure of letters,
This is what you are to them.
Long and polysyllabic,
a frustrating combination of strange, small word-parts
And that Y (such an indecisive letter!):
flung in there so gracelessly.
You are repulsive to them;
You have broken their rhythm
of short, blocky words that trip off the tongue
with your sudden and awkward out-of-place-ness.
You are abhorrent to them;
You have blurred their strict margins
of male and female roles,
of pants and skirts,
with your little blip of existence,
mucking about in the wrong side of the clothes store.
You are an anomaly, a mistake, a mystery to them;
You are a *** to be located
A term to be defined
A word to be pronounced
A gender to be assigned
But I like you.
I like how your letters sprawl,
confident and self-sure.
I like how your attire causes others to gawk
and reorder their worlds.
I like how your legs look in that tux,
your eyes in that dress.
How the long swoops of your g and your y
echo the way the ends of your undone tie drape from your collar:
Elegantly.
M.