He was equipped with a fine vocabulary Far in excess of his intellectual needs An entertaining fool Stocked with dictionaries Obscure constructions Medieval verbs Circumlocutory, verbose Impenetrable A simple mind hid amongst A confusion of entangled phrases As if using a foreign language Assembling hopefully meaningful phrases Where a listener may find coherence A simple message
Every request Every Statement Observation From his mouth, no matter how mundane Appeared decorated Embellished, almost.. Baroque
In this wordy fog It was hard to know Hard to find Traces of a real person A tangible, relatable identity Something predictable. In the swirling wind of Constantly shifting Complex expressions Seeming riddles.
He was a prisoner A lifer Doomed to remain Incarcerated in his usage Dense, cloying, exaggerated, unyielding Usage He could not avoid Unconscious, reflexive, merciless He did not struggle, That ended long ago.
A simple phrase came to me on a bike ride, the first two lines of this poem. It became a short prose piece for my blog. Now it is also a poem.