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Apr 2011
Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is
as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip
of my words. My language trembles with desire.
-Roland Barthes

My* language is a skin I have outgrown.
It sloughs off in flakes,
leaving letters or the occasional
ill-suited, illegible word
trailing behind me.

I pick at adverbs and articles
hanging from my fingertips;
This morning I pulled a whole phrase
off my arm like a sunburn.

My language, once alight,
now settles like cinders
on the ground,
around the shower drain,
upon my sheets;
My language no longer serves me.

Peel my vocabulary off my back,
tear my diction from my shoulders,
and my syntax from my chest;
Scratch the punctuation off my face—
my lips are chapped with parentheses.

Tomorrow I will have shed my language—
Unbound from an ill-fitting lexicon—
coughed the alphabet from my lungs
and exhaled the last serif
like cigarette smoke
to find the world new,
uncontained and undefined.
In addition to Roland Barthe, Margaret Atwood's "You Begin" contributed to the original idea behind this poem.
Ethan Taylor
Written by
Ethan Taylor
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